it's twenty past four,
i have spent the past hour watching
the Vierschanzentournee -
like someone in England might
have stayed up, watching
the n.f.l. or a boxing match...
i bought johnny walker black
at the airport and i sat there
watching history.
                        can there be a modernised
version of ecce ****?
             apart from dietery requirements
and angst against Wagner
and all that pompous rattle
invoked in the original by Herr N.?
i guess there can be...
    there i was, on my hiatus,
going to bed almost every single night
trying to sleep-palm a chess set
or a keyboard, but both seemed out
of reach...
                   this, again, a forceful
resignation toward the past day,
              it will never be perfect,
the first approach will always be
rusty, it has been three weeks
since i last entered this spiderweb,
of snappy convo and even snappier
overload of democratic practises;
and before me: endless sleepless
nights, and countless miniature
fürhers... and thus this fact:
  which i thought was worth avoiding...
but then i did buy a used laptop for
550zł, (given the exchange rate,
that's roughly £100... the downside?
everything is in paul-leash (no,
that's not an americanism of drawl
and draw and slobber and Houdini's
last trick) - hence i might actually
sport a cravat, moccasins and a
velvet dinner jacket...
                                   and when
Rodin employed his minions to
    chisel away at chapters from Dante,
Dumas (have you ever seen his
omni coprus?) like some pseudo-Pope
employed heavy-drinking monks
to write out his stories for salon bored
ladies until their hands were
playing shadow-arthritis games
         that children would applaud:
rabbit! rabbit! poor monks, exhausted
from having scribbled and
chicken scratched chicken blood into
papyrus wanted nothing more than
to grow their nails so they couldn't
hold a quill... no matter! Dumas would
say... we'll sharpen your nails,
vol. 25 of the comte bourbon &
the flamingo dance, and Rambo XVI
were both written by the unfortunate
monks...
              once again: there's
autobiography... and there's an autobiography...
  to write an autobiography
so that no biography is worth writing...
perhaps if i used paragraphs:
i could be considered: "serious".
      then there's that thought:
thought as origin of biographics -
           nothing to be preserved in
it having happened, returning from
Stansted in a taxi:
  only a thought:
   philosophy cannot claim anything
to be counter-intuitive in its foundation,
to me that conjures up an analogue:
the guillotine is the counter-intuitive
foundation of the french revolution...
Ivan the terrible threw dogs off the Kremlin
wall, and gauged out the eyes of the St. Basil's
architect... and since then
children in Poland loved to play:
throw a bunch of marbles into a little hole...
evidently ancient Egypt resounded
in capricious cappuccino Milan...
or: Míllánò! nurse! nurse! the syllable-scalpel!
herr doctor, is that defined by diacritical
marks? yes sister.
                  **** in boots to suit you toppling
too...  and may i add:
             how ever did i digress from
the mundane reality of: second-hand laptop,
Windows in Polish... every single word
in english: red tape, underlined...
if i have dyslexia, it'll show like a crow's
feather on a dove -
and when it does, you can start calling
me Chief Apache Pixie Jack...
or how you have black and white as
polar, the rainbow... and then
nights in grey satin by the bothersome blues.
this will be defined by lacklustre
and hopping along... then, vaguely:
a romance?
                        it was supposed to
be a hiatus... hiatus...
         3 weeks of what became defined by
anything but such hopes...
   some people span a literary career of
20 years... take 3 years to write a book...
         it takes me 3 years to keep
a single thought...
          can you really repress biographic
accounts these days?
                                 well... if written
par with the times, i guess it's as much
fun as questioning whether
     the following two are very much akin:
1 + 2 + 3 = 5 - 10 + 20 x 2 = 30
is the same sort of arithmetic as when
you do the "math"of writing out
a word like onomatopoeia...
the hanging vowels of babylon...
          if anything, then this -
             as it also could be: on the scrapheap
of memory, a dazzling iron-clad
      heftiness of pulverising vector -
a Gucci demanding a pulpit and an
avocado on toast... champagne and
squid... or as the Michelin criteria were
revealed: rubber tire and squid di Calabria...
tell the two apart... you'll get a republic
passport... who would have thought
that rubber tires were the benchmark,
the ph 7 of foody palettes across the
azure blob, with some ashen and fern
bits in between.
   but this is me, testing new equipment...
having spent 3 weeks on two kinds
of detox... alcoholic... oh the whiskey...
and the ski jumping gavrons...
   plush? sparrels in a rolling dozen
of figurative barrels - and more sensibly?
kestrels, petted by stiff, castrated
   hippos of the sky, akin to astronomy
naming blobs: pi-7773-quatro-offshoot-of
Juno...
                 or a boo boo 747...
about as gracious as a **** launched
off a trebuchet at the dome of the rock...
gimmicky the sliding down...
hot wedge like swallowing a sword...
                3 weeks on this vegetarian
diet... detox alcohol detox 21st century
phonebook...
    rusty first imprints from the waiting game...
but my my...
               wasn't it fun...
                  Jan Kazimierz Waza
(the finicky cardinal)
                                       as presented by
Horatio... no no: John Ignatius Kraszewski...
   (Copernicus was apparently Prussia)...
which means Ignacy was Bella Belyy Kraшevsky...
      which makes me wonder:
why is the violin the pauper's? instrument
or the instrument of hoped-for empathy?
any one would tell you:
as also the accordion player on a tree...
well... roof here, roof there:
try doing ballerina's tip toe on a gothic
spiral tip of a cathedral...
and yes, the gargoyles... sing-along:
silent night...
                       holy night...
again: this was supposed to be a hiatus...
dogmatic statements... and....
    apodictic statements...
                      in truth, most people are
size 0 with their diet of words....
      where that turkey of a tongue to
fatten 'im up? well... ask the shepherds
of Damashek when Saladin will come
to rattle the blacksmith to wield a sword.
a thousand maidens faint...
   (if this was a cabaret voltaire play,
it would happen...
    and the two will never win:
one has a crop of hair on the scalp,
but spider-legs of a beard on the chin...
the other has precious silverware on
the scalp... and 21st Amazonian nomads
peeping out from between his
beard)... well...
not bad for a break from hiatus...
the whiskey is good,
                    the breadth has already been
tested...
   oh yes, the dreaded notes...
   this was supposed to be a:
a 3 week break, bam! a whole session
of writing it out in one go,
beginning with: the first question
i was asked as the Western Warsaw coach station:
do Kijova? i.e. to Kiev?
       oh sure, plenty of Ukranian merchants
down the western side of Warsaw...
   a Ukranian family of only women
sitting eating 3 while chickens among other
things: polskie chlopachki nie placzy...
and if you're lucky! you might even spot
a Mongolian!
                    it was never going to be an easy
transition...
i left Poland when it was -18°C...
                   sunny... bitter...
   walking on snow was like either
hearing a meow purr every time the foot impressed
itself on the snow, or i was wearing latex...
                 and to come into this abysmall
+7°C "winter" that England is?
   gothica... rain in winter... only in England...
and yes, if i were born here
i would be making awckward jokes about
the rain... but i wasn't.... i inherited it
from some unforseen discourse about
     Saint Gorbachev and how bloodless it all
became... prized piglets of Kazakh:
   dollar baby koo chi go go west and buys
usés a Lambro-jini... plight of the Sinking Belgian:
and all he did was sail to Congo on a waffle...
   pity the man! pity the man!
    i have no romance with England...
the grey skies and the constant rain
are like toenails to my heart... they're just there...
but you just see me walk in that pine
forest... in my natural element...
                              -18°C...
why did only German poets philosophise?
   and why did only Shakespeare make
poetry indistinguishable from philosophy and
why did the French turn to pastries
                                rather than the dry
and cough infused pages of bookworm time-donning
yella spaniel sepia waggle waggle
                  Sorbone          
   & Pavlov... pretty girls and pretty boys in
the Erasmus programme... to Rome!
to Antwerp! to Brioche! ... to a brioche...
                      Bruges!
                                               Kiev aflame...
Cracow a mind-game...
            Prague merely an INXS postcard from
the early 1990s...
                    Berlin a wall...
   Munich a litre of gods' **** and company of a dog:
of a dog's intuitive measure of man's
competence with regards to a desire for gods...
                   Lvov... thankfully Lvov
will never be the Istambul of Byzantines' nostalgia...
   so too Vilno...
                                                well...
that's for starters.

A text for five voices.

Note on text: For formatting reasons, this should be read on a full screen, or in landscape mode on a mobile.

i. Blank copy

I look out of the window at
the houses as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                    or glide past
                                                the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
House after house after house after house
                                                dit-dit-dit­-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the houses
                                  as they pass.
It’s 10 o’clock when I arrive at my office
and no-one is there yet
and I turn on my computer.
I sort of just
                sit there
                for quite a long time. Then
at 10.37 I print a document I’ve been working on
and I pick up my mug and I go to the kitchen where the printer is
and I put the kettle on.
I log on to the printer but instead of pressing
                                                Print
  ­                                              I press
                                                        Cop­y
                                                        instead­.
The machine whirs
The light goes
                        across
And out comes this copy this
        Copy of
                nothing.
I pick it up from the cradle.
It’s warm.
And I hold it and I look at it and I think:
                                                This is a copy
                                                                ­of nothing.
And since it is no longer an empty piece of paper but now
                                                             ­   something more
                                                            ­    something
                                                   ­                                imbued
I don’t put it back in the paper tray
and I don’t put it in the bin.
I carry it carefully with my tea back
to my office and put it
                                Carefully
                    ­                            on my desk.
I close the door.
Usually when I arrive and no-one is there I keep the door open for a bit.
It’s my way of letting people know I’m here.
It also helps me get a sense of what’s going on in the building
which students are there and what they’re doing
and once I’ve got a decent enough idea
or if there’s someone around I don’t really feel like helping
                                                         ­                           I close the door.
Today it is quiet.
It is a Friday.
                     Fridays are quiet.
It is the seventh of March.
It is 2014.
              I’m looking out of the window as I recall
              without much interest
              that yesterday was my father’s sixty-first birthday.
The buses tick past the window.
Without really thinking I
roll down the blind
                            Until the window is as blank as my copy of
                                                              ­                                           nothing.
I look at it but I
don’t
              sit
                     down
                                   yet.
My computer makes a noise and a purple box
tells me I have a meeting in thirty minutes.
                                                        ­Oh shut up I tell it
                                                        out loud.
Now I realise that I never did print my document
so I go back to the printer and the file is still there waiting for me
and I press Print All
                     and out it comes
and the piece of paper looks
Obnoxious
                     scrawled over in heavy black print
                     and ****** coloured columns
                                                                ­      and smelling
                                                        ­              Smelling of toner.
For someone who claims to be conscious of the environment I
print excessively. But only at work.
It’s the combination of it being free
                                          (or at least, no cost to me)
and that feeling you get when you
swipe
your access card to log in to the printer
and tap the screen dit-dit-dit to choose this or that.
It feels
       to me
              like being a grown-up.
It’s intoxicating.
I don’t want to go to the meeting
and I’m suddenly annoyed by this ***** piece of paper
which
       I ***** up
                     and throw in the bin.
**** it.
Not even in the recycling.
**** it.
Who cares.
              What difference could it possibly make
              whether I throw this piece of paper
                                                 which I will now have to print again
              in the black part of the bin for waste
              or the green part of the bin for recycling.
I go back to my computer and press Print but
this time
I keep clicking my mouse
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          Yeah.
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
And I go back to the printer and the name of the document comes up on the built-in screen
dozens and dozens of times
the same name of the same document
and I tap
              Print All.
And as the machine spits out clone after clone I
mutter under my breath:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
Then out loud:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
And as I throw them in the bin and go back for more I think
I’m going to buy a car. Yeah.
And I’m going to drive my car to work and
when I finish work I’m going to drive it
to a big supermarket
                            a hypermarket
                            a super hyper mega market
where I will buy and buy and buy,
and on my way home I will buy petrol to put in my car
       And I will go on holiday
       I will book all those last minute deals on the internet
       And go to Turkey or Lanzarote or Corfu for a hundred
                                                         ­      or a couple of hundred
                                                         ­      pounds, every month maybe
And I’ll fly there on a big plane.
I’ll soar over the ocean on a big plane.
And when I come back
I’ll soar over all those people outside Stansted Airport
All those
people
With banners
Moaning and complaining and protesting
Banners saying things like
                                   I don’t know
                                                 “Down with planes”
And as the flight attendant smiles goodbye I’ll think
yeah.
       Down with planes.
                                   And I’ll drive my car home and I will
                                   stop
                                   worrying
                                   about
                                   everything.
I go back to my office.
I retrieve one copy of my document from the bin and I
put it on top of my copy of nothing.
Whereas before the document offended me
                            now I have difficulty
                            telling the difference between the two.
My colleague arrives and she tells me about the motorway.
She’s always telling me about the motorway.
I think about my car I’m going to buy and I
think about being on the motorway.
I think about being on that part of the M25
where the planes are so low you duck as they thunder over you
and they come
                     in rapid succession
                                          dit dit dit
                                                        rapid­ eye movement
                                                        ­radar.
I think about being stuck in traffic there and the air
thick with exhaust fumes
mixing with the air around Heathrow
and all those tons of jet fuel from the planes zooming over
Blink and you miss them
                                   but always another follows.
I go to my meeting.
I realise that I have picked up my blank copy
along with the document I printed for the meeting.
Someone says they wish I’d printed more than one copy
as it turns out it would be useful for everyone to have one
and I laugh in their face without explaining myself.
                                                         ­             I make notes on it.
                                                             ­         My copy of nothing.
                                                        ­              Without really realising
                                                       ­               I’ve scribbled notes on it
but as I look at my spidery black biro handwriting
and think with some real despair about how I have mindlessly
destroyed
something pure
the notes
              disappear
                                int­o the paper
and it is clean again.



ii. Ringing sea

My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough.
What I’m looking at
my rational brain tells me
is a video of two people having ***.
I have seen that before.
But what I’m actually watching is a video of
my husband
                     having ***
                                          with another woman.
And my eyes don’t refresh the image fast enough
So I keep seeing his face.
The whole picture melts away and
I just see his face
                     Which belongs to me.
                                          It’s my face. I – own it.
                                                        It’s my- my- my-
                                                        And it freezes there
just his face is all I can see then the video continues for a
split second then freezes again
                                   His face
                                   His face
                                   His face       It’s him
                                                        It’s him
                                                        It’s him.
I stop the video and I put the phone down on the table
and I breathe very deeply and
every time I blink, between every saccade
there is his face
                            a face I know intimately
                                                      ­         and it’s looking away from me.
I turn on the television. It is Saturday.
He is flying back from Asia on Tuesday. I have until then to
                                                              ­        what?
The sound and light from the television
flicker over me
And I sort of just empty,
Quietly, like a balloon disappearing into the sky.
I don’t know what I’m going to do but
for now that’s
fine.
The brown armchair swallows me up
and I cry for two hours without really noticing.
The cookery programme I’m not watching finishes and I think
the news is about to come on so I turn off the TV
and I put on my shoes
and I go down the stairs and out of the house
and I get in my car.
It’s raining and I just sit there.
Without starting the engine I flick on the windscreen wipers:
                                                         ­      Dit / dit.
                                                            ­   Dit \ dit.
                                                            ­   Dit / dit.
It takes less than three seconds for them to pass
from one side of the windscreen to the other.
And I get this feeling this
unexplainable feeling
that I want to crawl inside that moment
when the wipers are moving from one side of the screen
                                                          ­                   to the other.
I flip down the sun shield and look at myself in the mirror.
There are two lipsticks in the glove compartment.
I pick the darker one
                            and apply it
                                                 carefully
                                                       ­          sensually.
I start the car.
West London ebbs away to the motorway
My car is silver and in the rain it feels invisible
I don’t know where I’m going
                                I follow words on signposts I recognise the shape of
                                without really reading them
and I keep driving
I let my eyes come away from the road and
watch the fields and trees tick past like cells of film
and I look at the cars on the other carriageway
and I notice they’re all silver like mine
                                                        (onl­y mine is invisible)
and I duck as a Boeing 777 soars over near the M4 interchange
and let myself scream soundlessly under the roar of its engines.
I wonder where it came from.
                                          I think about the people on board.
I think about their mobile phones and
all the ******* there must be on them
and I realise
how many videos there must be in the world
of people having ***.
I take the M23 past Gatwick Airport
                                          the motorway ends but I keep driving
until finally I come to the sea.
No-one is here because it’s March and it’s raining.
I have always loved the sea.
Not sailing or swimming or surfing
Just being near it, for me it’s
                                   a spiritual experience.
I’ll lie on the stones and gaze at the sky for hours
but not today.
                     There are some flowers tied to a railing
                     somebody has drowned.
Presumably they never found a body to bury.
The awfulness of that strikes me like a stone.
                                                        It­’s the not knowing.
                                                        ­The lack of 100% concrete total proof.
I take my phone out of my handbag.
                                                        ­But I know now.
The shingle crunches underneath my flat shoes.
                                                        No­w I know.
The cold burns my ears and the wind picks up as I get closer to the water
the tide slips serpentine up the stones
white-edged
                     beckoning me.
Without realising I’ve slipped
                                                 out of
                                                            my­ shoes
but the stones do not hurt my coarse feet
and the wind
                     howling now
                                          catches me behind my knees
quickening my stride.
The spit curls around my toes.
And then I catch myself wondering
                                          whether my husband will call me or
                                          text me when he lands
and I hurl
       my phone
              into the sea.
On the drive home I listen to the radio.
The news is dominated by the Crimean conflict
and the referendum that’s coming up there.
Florence Nightingale
                            is all I can think about when they talk about Crimea.
Until recently I never even knew where it was.
At school you only learn about Florence Nightingale
                                   not the geography
                                          not the conflicts
                                                 not Ukraine’s edges so charred by
                                                               invasion and,
                                                                ­             subsequently,
                                                                ­                                  explosion.
                    ­               We live in so many war zones.
and I’m wondering what else I never learned about when
the story changes and now they are talking about a plane.
A plane is missing
                                   between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing
                                          and the blood drains out of me.
It isn’t like floating away like a balloon this time
it’s like plunging off a cliff.
And at once I see
                            with brilliant, burning clarity
                                                        m­y phone, ringing, on the sea bed
The light from the screen illuminates the stormy water but
I can’t see the name:
                                   I can’t see who’s calling.
I need to know.
I need to know it’s him.
       I drive back at twice the speed limit.
In the dark the flowers look menacing and half-dead; my
shoes fall off in the same place
But the tide is in so the whole beach looks different.
I’m up to my waist but my
top half
       is as wet
              as my bottom half
                            because the rain
                                          is torrential
                                                      ­  and I can still hear the phone ringing
                                                        b­ut I can’t see the light in the sea.
and I howl
       his name
but the wind carries it away soundlessly
       and I can’t tell if I’m
              further out
              or if the tide’s further in
                            and the ringing grows louder
                            as the current takes me powerfully by the waist and
                                                             ­         the stars rush by overhead.



iii. Acid rain

Every time I blink, between every saccade I see
a brilliant but infinitesimally brief flash of colour.
       Purple
       or green
       I think.
                     One on top of the other.
It’s hard to tell for sure because they’re so brief.
It’s like when you look at a light bulb for too long
                                                            ­   or stare directly at the sun.
I see it sometimes when I’m on my bike
or on a really big rollercoaster
                                   going downhill at 100 miles an hour
                                   the wind blasting through me
                                   the screams whirling through the air.
But I’m not on a rollercoaster, I’m sat very still
it’s Monday afternoon and I’m at school.
I haven’t said a single word to a single person today.
I didn’t even answer my name in the register.
I feel a bit dizzy like
                                   everything is turning together
                                   but I’m on a different
                                                       ­                 axis?
I think the bell goes, I’m
not a hundred percent sure,
but I leave anyway and no-one stops me.
       Outside in the sunshine the flashes of colour are
       several thousand times brighter.
In the next lesson I slip in my earbuds and
it looks like the teacher is singing the words.
                                                 I put on the most obscene song I can find.
I must have it on too loud
because eventually she notices and
she forces me to give her the headphones. This is the first time
someone has spoken to me today
                                          it feels a bit surreal
                                                         ­      but the world stops spinning
                                                        ­       a bit.
After school I go into the supermarket on Wigmore Lane
the enormous white of it is tinged in green and purple
and all I want is to buy a drink
                            I have a feeling of exactly the kind of drink I want
                            but I can’t find the right one
                            even though the fridge must be longer than
                            the driveway of my house.
Racks of newspapers and magazines clamour for my attention
       the only real colour in this great white warehouse of a store
       red tops and blue spreads
       and green and purple and green and purple
              and green and purple…
They’re talking about that missing plane in the news
and they keep using the same phrase.
They’re talking about the people on board the missing plane
and they keep saying
                            Missing
                      ­      presumed dead.
Not dead dead. Presumed dead.
I start wondering what it’s like to be both dead and alive at the same time,
as if all the people on board that plane are like Schrödinger’s cat
              (cats)
and we won’t know whether they’re dead or alive until we find the plane
and pull it out of the sea
and look inside
                     so
                         until then
                     they’re both.
Out in the car park I count the planes as they descend onto
the runway less than a mile away.
       One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
       I figure about a hundred and eighty a plane maybe,
       which means fifteen hundred people just arrived in Luton.
Nobody comes to Luton for the scenery.
Soon they’ll be gone,
A town haunted by a ghost population of thousands an hour.
                                                 filtered onto the trains and buses
                                                 and out from the sprawling car parks
                                                 to the motorway, and
                                                 onto connecting flights back into Europe
              but none of them will stay in Luton
                                                           ­                  Missing
                                                         ­                    presumed dead.
As I bike through Luton I think it might not be so strange to be dead and alive at the same time.
I’ve lived here my whole life and the whole place
                                                           ­                         which is a *******
                                                 moves with the mundanity of machinery
                                                 like the big car factories by the airport
                                                 the lights on, the production lines rolling
                                                 but all a bit automatic and lifeless.
But in the airport, it’s different.
The air, with its artificial chill, hangs with a faint shimmer
and the people here move purposefully, and with charge
                                                          ­     excitedly
                                                       ­                      or dejectedly
                                                      ­         but not neutrally
heading for the gates where they are sealed two hundred a time into airtight tubes
like Schrödinger’s cat:
                            dead and alive in the air;
                            one or the other on the ground.
                                                         ­      My teachers say I have an
                                                              ­ “odd way of looking at things”.
I leave my bike outside without chaining it up and go into the terminal.
In a café in the check-in hall I find exactly the drink I want
and I pay £2.75 for it.
                            I look at the departure boards.
                            Edinburgh. Bonn. Marseilles.
                            A green light flashes next to each gate as it opens
                                                           ­                  green and purple
                                                          ­                   green and purple
                                                          ­                                 Missing
                                                         ­                                  presumed dead
The flashes of colour are growing brighter
every time I move my eyes a green and purple streak follows behind like a jet stream
but the bustle and activity of the airport is so much that I can’t keep my eyes still
       so they keep darting
                            this way and that
                                                 until my vision is painted over
                                                            ­                 green and purple.
The streaks roll over each other like clouds of acid rain.
       This is the final call for flight 370 to–
My bike is gone when I go back outside
The front of the terminal is a plateau of thousands upon thousands of cars
and it’s probably in one of them
                                          but I’ll never know which.
The car parks reach all the way back to the runway.
Green and purple acid rain from all the jet fuel mixed with the air
melts a hole in the fence and I slip through
moving purposefully
                            with charge
                                          across the green and purple grass
                                          scorched by a hundred thousand landings
                                          a hundred thousand people arriving in Luton
And there on the tarmac
                     glinting in the rain
                     surrounded by blinking amber
       there is my bike
       its black handlebars spread like the wings of a jet plane.
I duck as an Airbus screams in just a few feet over my head
the rush from the engine lifting the soles of my feet from the ground.
I pick up the bike and start pedalling
                                                 pedalling down the runway
                                                 pedalling towards the blinking amber.
It feels light, nimble, fast
the tyres take the asphalt with ease.
And the faster I go the lighter I feel
       the acid rain eats away at my clothes
       and they melt off my body and pool on the runway below,
                     Lighter
                            and lighter until…
                                                 The wheels lift away from the ground
                                                          ­     and in the air I am dead and alive
                                                 and maybe nobody will
                                                                ­                           ever
                                                            ­                               see me
                                                                ­                           again.



iv. Burning sky

The faster I go, the lighter I feel.
I’ve taken the night watch and the yacht
is cruising across the Indian Ocean
penetrating the black abyss like a white bullet
and the lights in the portholes send shimmering white bullet shapes
for miles across the endless ink.
                                                            ­                 What?
                     We’re not going very fast at all
                     But it feels like any minute
                                                 we might drop off the edge of the world.
I hope we do.
I feel light and dizzy and irrational
                                          and I feel aware of being
                                          light and dizzy and irrational
and I wonder if this is what going mad feels like.
Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
I
       feel like that a lot lately.
Marc is sleeping.
We didn’t speak much today.
I can’t really remember how long it’s been
       since we left Victoria but the fight
       we had there
                            in a bistro by the port we
       said things we
       said things that
                            we can’t take back.
The Seychelles were stifling.
The heat was stifling.
He was stifling.
And the people were stifling
                                   the people kept talking about pirates.
                                   They kept warning us about pirates.
                                   You’re sailing where
                                                        the­y say
                                   You must be careful
                                                        t­hey say
                                   It’s notorious
                                                       ­ they say
I have fantasies about being kidnapped by pirates.
Not stupid Johnny Depp pirates with *** and parrots, no
       Real pirates.
                     Nasty pirates.
                     With dark snarls and AK-47s.
When we were at sea off the Horn I’d see things on the horizon
Dots or lights I couldn’t make out
And I’d imagine the rifle against my neck
Their hot breath
Chains and ransoms.
                          I’d wonder how much we’d be worth.
                          If we’d make national news.
                          Would it be David Cameron to announce,
                                                       ­        regrettably,
                                                    ­           we don’t negotiate with pirates,
                          or would it be someone less important?
                          Maybe just the foreign secretary.
                          What is the worth of my life at the end of a steel barrel?
But it would only be a buoy, or a plane on the horizon,
and I would get into bed with Marc
       disappearing under the covers like a different kind of hostage.
I
              oh
                                   I
                                                 Sorry
I’m crying.
                     I don’t know when I started crying.
The thing is I don’t know if it’s me breaking the marriage
or the marriage breaking me.
I’m watching everything literally fall to pieces and for all I know
it’s me with the detonator.
And then
              everything
literally falls to pieces
                            My mug of coffee falls from my hand
                            shatters on the deck
                                                            ­and the sea rears up nightmarishly.
Above me
a long orange **** of flame
is burned into the sky.
                            No, really.
                            That’s not a metaphor.
                                                       ­        There is fire in the sky.
It’s about a mile up and a mile away.
Look.
       There.
              ****.
                            **** **** ****.
What is that?
                                   Marc!
I call for Marc.
                                   Marc!
       There is fire in the sky.

–              Katherine.

       Fire in the sky.
       Fire in the
       Fire in

–              Katherine.

       Fire

–              Katherine.

       What
              Marc, what?

–              Are you awake?

       I think so.

–              You were calling out again.

       Calling

–              Calling out. You were shouting.

       What
       where
       What time is it?
                                   Where

–              Dubai. We’re in Dubai. It’s 7.
                They delayed again while you were sleeping.

       Dubai?

–              Katy I really think you should see a doctor.

       Don’t call me that.

–              Pardon?

       Katy.
       Don’t call me that.
                                          Like

–          ­                                       Like what?

       Everything’s okay.

–

       Everything’s not okay.

–               There’s
                 doctors. You’re not well. You’ve been confused since,
                 well actually since before it even happened.

       You think I’ve been confused.

–              Not right.
                Not you.

       You’re **** right.

–              Forget it.

       Thank you.

–              Go back to sleep. ****.



–              Are you still seeing it?
                The plane? On fire.
                                   You’re dreaming about it, aren’t you?

       Yes.

–              It’s affecting you?

       I’m
              just
                     unhappy,
       Marc.

–              That’s not just it though is it?

       What’s that supposed to mean?

–              Something about seeing that
                                                           ­   plane has scared you.

       We don’t know it was the plane.
       The one that –

–                            No. But, right place, right time.
              They said

       Maybe.

–              It’s still a coincidence.
                It’s not

                                   What

–                                   A sign.
                                     From god.
                                     Or
                                          whatever.

     ­                                     Whatever you think it means.



                            Katherine.

       The thing I don’t know, Marc
       is if I’m more scared that it was the plane
       or that it wasn’t.

–

       Imagine.
       Vanishing.
       Into thin air.

–              I know.

                            No, you don’t.
       Disappearing
                            into thin air
       Or falling
                            out of it.

–              Falling.

       You can’t imagine that.

–              I can.



–              I can, Katy.
                I ******* can
                                          Imagine.
       ­         Falling.
                Disappearing.
             ­   Into thin air.

                *******
                            i­nvisible.

                 I am
                           right
                          ­          ******* here,
                                                        K­atherine.

       I see you.
       I see you Marc.
       But you’re not
                            solid.

       I’m not
                            solid.
                          ­                              See?

                           ­                             It passes
                                                          ­     right through.

       Now you see me.
                                   Now yo–



v. 2015

Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
The hotel room here in Singapore is almost identical
to the room I had in Mexico City.
The heat feels the same and it’s the same
nondescript decoration
which doesn’t really belong to any time or culture.
It gives me a headache. The neutrality of it.
As I check my messages I remember
                                                        ­       I’m not in Singapore.
I’m in Kuala Lumpur.
I haven’t been home for nearly three weeks now.
It’s ridiculously late
The IOC conference is at six thirty
              and I’ve been asleep all day.
                                   I get dressed and grab my camera
                                   and leave the hotel with a large, black coffee.
At the press call I see a man from Reuters I recognise.
       The coffee here is terrible.
I talk to him about his family
              his daughter is four now
              he’s shaved off his beard since I last saw him
              and he’s moving, he says,
                                                 near me apparently
                                                 to Southend.
                                                       ­               “London Southend” he jokes
                                                                ­      with a roll of his eye
                                                             ­         and inverted commas.
I say yeah that’s quite near me then move away to take a phone call.
Inside the press conference there are ten people at the table
       the women are all wearing identical powder blue suits which
       strikes me as idiosyncratically Asian for no good reason.
The men all wear simultaneous translation headphones
                                                      ­                but the women don’t.
I wonder if this is because they speak better English than the men
or if it just isn’t considered necessary to translate for them.
       They have given the Winter Olympics to Beijing.
              I wonder what is lost between the
              Mandarin spoken by the mayor of Beijing
              and the English spoken by the translator.
                                                     ­          The space between words.
                                                          ­     The space between looking left
                                                            ­                               and looking right.
It’s a nice atmosphere in the cool air-conditioned room.
I’m struck by how nice everyone is
       except for the British delegates
       including the man from Reuters who speculates
       that the voting was rigged.
A while later someone else calls it a “farce”.
              I get a photograph of the IOC President’s face
                                                            ­          as it falls
              and email it to my office from my seat.
Outside, the Petronas towers rise above the conference centre like
enormous empty silos.
This is my first time in Kuala Lumpur
                                          the last city I have to visit before I go home.
I get in a taxi and say the name of my hotel
                                          and the city flashes by.
I look out of the window at
the buildings as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                   or glide past
                                                        the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
Building after building
                            dit-dit-dit-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the buildings
                            as they pass.
The taxi stops and I pay seventeen ringgit and get out:
it has gone by the time I realise this is not my hotel.
I don’t know where I am but I was in the taxi long enough to know that I
am some distance
                            from the centre of the city.
I look up at the name of the hotel the driver has taken me to
and the English transliteration is very similar to the name of the hotel I am staying in.
       I go inside.
There’s a nightclub in the hotel
I order Glenfiddich
                            double,
                 ­           cut with water.
              not because I like it but
              because there’s something about scotch that feels
                                                           ­                         moneyed
              heavy amber liquid in heavy-bottomed glasses
              it helps me buy into this idea of the travelling businessman
              even though that’s a lie.
                                                        I’m just a man who takes pictures.
                                                       ­ And I want to go home.
I sit at the bar which is as long as my driveway.
I swirl my glass and watch the amber legs trickle down the sides.
A moving light above it hits the gloss black surface
with an open white like the early morning sun on my gravel
                                                          ­                   as I get into my car.
A girl from here, young enough to be my daughter, is talking to me.
She points out her friends and I half-wave, uneasily
and she asks what I’m drinking.
                                          A news alert on my phone says a piece of
                                          plane wreckage
                                          washed up
                                                        on Réunion
                                                        i­n the Indian Ocean,
                                   east of Madagascar and south of the Seychelles.
The girl seems nice. She says her name is Dhia
                                                            ­                 it means “glowing”.
She doesn’t seem to want anything,
certainly not ***;
her friends have disappeared so
                                          I dance with her.
As we dance I see something in her eyes that is at once
both young and
                     endlessly wise.
She has deep brown eyes exactly the colour of earth
and a small mouth which smiles brilliantly.
In the half-light they open up to me like pools
                                                 and I imagine
                                                         ­             swimming
                                           ­      in them.
Even though she’s only nineteen, twenty-one at most,
there is something about her that’s
                                          maternal
       ­                                   spiritual
                    ­                      nourishing.
She asks me what I’m doing in Kuala Lumpur and I tell her
I don’t know.
She asks me what I did today and I tell her I
                                                               ­              slept
                                                           ­           then took some photographs.
You’re a photographer, she says, and I shrug
then she leans into my ear and says
                                                        don’­t tell anyone.
What
       I say
and she says
              I’m a princess.
And I look into her eyes and she isn’t lying.
She says no-one is going to recognise her
but
       just in case
                            she isn’t supposed to be seen drinking.
Who would I tell
I say to her.
She grins and finishes her beer and it’s true
                                   no-one is looking at her
                                   but she’s the most magnetic person in the room.
In the taxi I say the name of my hotel extremely slowly
and the driver replies in perfect English
                                                         ­      yes sir, I know where you mean.
Kuala Lumpur ticks by in electric darkness.
I flick through the news as we drive
                                                 I see the photo I took this evening about
                                                 a dozen times
                                                 or more.
There is something bitter about the tone in all the British press when they talk about the Olympics
as if:
Beijing get to do it twice?
                                   What about us?
I think about a country with a quarter of the world’s population
and I think about the tiny little island I’ve come from
                                                        and I feel smaller than I’ve ever felt.
The aircraft wing that washed up in Réunion is from a Boeing 777,
they say.
The same type of aircraft as the one that went down last year.
The one they never found.
                            It was going from here to Beijing.
                            Last communication at 1.19am.
And it’s at
                     that
                     time
                     precisely
                                   my phone rings.
It’s my boss in London
she says the Chinese Olympic Committee
are scheduling press conferences.
                                                    ­    It looks like I’m going to Beijing.

draft enclosed below... prior to?

    whiskey, always with the whiskey...
                         there was, some, "pressing" matter,
to give me over to grief...
     a grief that was never going
to be a grief...
                  more, a, bewildering in situ...
something unavoidable...
                        like finding respectable
homosexuals akin to douglas murray...
             ah! that's what it was...
watching the premier of rammstein's song
ausländer? thoughts?
                 "teaching" colonialißation in reverse?
truly... france, england,
   perhaps even spain...
                              teaching...
good teachers...
                   they were always going
to be good teachers...
                     the only colonialißm
the germans ever ventured to address was
of their neighbours...
       ****** choice...
                   oh but i'm pretty sure
you would come back from Warsaw
with a homogeneity nausea sickness...
   i know i do...
         every single time,
   the homogeneous ethno-representation
is nauseating...
       even though, i'm stepping back
into a throng, of, "my own" people...
   i lived on the outskirts of loon'don for far
to long, i don't see an ivory beauty,
the pearls of Ghana,
      or some ***** and blue indian,
i start to "worry"...
                              i once traveled to
Cheltenham... and it, felt,
     like i was walking through Warsaw...
i don't even know whether i was surprised,
or whether i was experiencing the same
homogeneity nausea sickness...
                    each step of passing through
the city, i wanted to puke...
                         well not out an aversion
to being white among whites...
                        i guess i'm just the remains
of the globalist narration of so many
different people living in close proximity...
hub...
             as if revising a city akin to Rome...
when once in a year, gladiator slaves would
come for a month of festivity,
and the whole world was revelead
  with all its faces and hues...
                    but the germans know this...
inverted colonialißm -
         of being "colonialißed"...
                         i'm pretty sure the folk
in Warsaw are less understanding
     to the chocolatiers of Brussels...
                          because, as far as i am concerned...
Brexit, really, really came...
        when... the privileged status
of former British Empire citizens put to
question, a sudden surge in the floodgates
being opened for the former iron curtain countries,
you could have told these Pakistanis,
these Indians...
         don't worry... these people have come...
but... don't think they'll stay...
some will...
                   but most of them come
from an environment of homogeneity...
perfect example...
              a flight from Warsaw to Stansted...
talk about "racism",
     talk about "multiculturalism"...
i said jack ****, i just listened to the debate
behind me between a "racist" man
and a youg, impressionable young woman,
who cited the book why i don't talk
to white people about racism...
            i came here aged 8...
            and as a first generation expatriate...
oh yes, i can use the term...
which is weird...
since if i really didn't sink into this tongue
i'd call myself an immigrant...
just like the english immigrants
to h'america or australia call themselves,
the alternative: expatriate...
               the "racist" cited an evolutionary
predisposition as to why same attracts same,
a contradiction of magnets,
but, then again, we're not talking magnets,
but people...
               i'm dissociated with my "fellow"
ethno-centered peoples...
       sure... memories of childhood friends,
digging holes and playing a game
of throwing marbles into them...
hide & seek at night...
   kicking each other in the ***...
                     my memory bank reaches
as far back as being aged 4...
so... yeah... i have a lot to work with...
   again... i woke about how else to describe
that supermarket cashier from yesterday,
how she wanted to become a paramedic...
how her perfect skin,
   without a bout of hay fever looked
radiant...
                            the words:
       like a lake of milk,
                                       illuminated by
a full moon in a night of frozen constellations
of stars, or perhaps only her love spots
   of moles.

    well... that's that... now i'm ready to cite
and translate some Horace...     

sunt quibus in satura videar nimis acer et
  ultra legem tendere opus; sine nervis altera
quidquid conpusui pars esse putat similsque
    meorum, mille die versus deduci posse.
Trebati, quid faciam? praescribe.
              <quiescas>
       <ne faciam, inquis, omnino versus?>
<aio.>
              <peream male, si non optimum
erat; verum nequeo dormire.>
    <ter uncti transnanto Tiberim,
            somno quibus est opus alto,
                   inriguumque mero sub noctem
corpus habento. aut si tantus amor
                             scribendi te rapit,
          aude Caesaris invicti res dicere,
multa laborum praemia laturus.>
   <cupidium, pater optime, vires
deficiunt; neque quivis horrentia pilis
agmina nec fracta pereuntis cupside Gallos
aut labentis equo describit volnera Parthi.>
<attamem et iustum poteras et scribere
fortem, Scipiadam ut sapiens Lucillius.>
      <haud mihi dero, *** res ipsa feret:
nisi dextro tempore Flacci verba per
attentam non ibunt Caesaris aurem:
      cui male si palpere, recalcitrat undique
tutus.>
<quanto recitus hoc quam tristi laedere
versus *** sibi quisque timet,
                           quamquam est intactus
        ed odit.>
                  <quid faciam?      

i guess this would be the perfect time
to write a translation before disclosing the draft...
well... it's Horace...
          who did Dante take to walk him
through hell?           wasn't it Virgil?
only a naive-****-show of a man would
take with him a Greek poet akin to Homer,
or Sappho...
       well... not exactly...
not if poetry attracts poetry...
     James Joyce decided upon Homer,
but i'm not a James Joyce...
if Dante desired to take Virgil as his guide...
i've decided upon Horace...
  and here's the translation:

some say, that in the art of satire i am too acute,
that i go beyond established confines (of the art),
the others, that i write without talent and that
the poems i write in a simialr vein,
can be written into their thousands, every day.
Trebati (a serbian name, etymological
meaning: to need;
point of conjecture... well... if the medieval
world is to be made concise...
and the etymology of slav, implying slave...
it... only appears to hold true for the southern
slavs... the balkan region...
  as far as i am concerned,
the northern slavs... didn't exactly
make it to slave status,
the southern slavs might have been
of the roman empire...)
       Trebati: what do you counsel?
say something!
     stop writing!
            therefore throw my poems
into a corner?
           yes!
         to the executioner, that might be best,
  but then what do during the night,
when it's impossible to fall to sleep?
   rub your body with oil,
thrice swim the length of the Tiber,
in the evening drink some wine -
          you'll thus banish insomnia;
and if still, you have an irresistible desire
to write, then write for the sake of passing
  the victorious deeds of Caesar for posterity;
a generous reward you will receive.
   willingly, but my strengths are modest,
for me to sing about the death of the Gaul
javelin throwers with their broken spears,
or the wounded Parthian,
                      when he's dragged by a horse.
celebrate then, because of this,
   his bravery, his sense of justice, his wisdom,
just like...

  ****! another googlewhack!

                 lucyliusz w scypiadzie
       https://tinyurl.com/y5u7uelu

       just like... Lucius in Scythia.
           maybe i will not tempt, when the right
time comes. the time isn't right, Caesar's ear will
not succumb to the compliments whispered
by Flacci...
           do not stroke the steed in time,
    which will with its hoof kick.
better that than by reproach via a poem
      of these mediocrities,
     like the clown Pantolabus or the grandson
of Nomentano -
        who without blame, and even as
being untouched, hates.
                               and what of it?
        
hell: now the draft...

when all seems bleak upon the blank
plateau and the calm seas of
thought being voided -
    i tend to find scraps of language worth
keeping,
  odd bits of letters no written,
      interrupted narratives -
conversations never had - or pivoting
upon an alternative choice of words,
never mind...
    i acquired english and made myself
its father -
              audacious, i agree -
but psychopathic? i hardly think so.
              to out-speak a native means:
doubling down - standing ground -
digging trenches...
                 i have made english into
the equivalent of an armchair,
    sitting pretty, sitting cosy,
   in some shady part of an east london
pub: peering into the stage, attempting
to differentiate the actors from the props
and the props from an: authenticity.
trick is... well, i can't read in my native tongue
when in england...
  which is why i am extremely anticipating
the december hiatus impeding...
immersed in an environment filled with
the nativspreschen - notably from
devices such as the radio and the t.v. -
   i can digest a book in my nativspreschen
with as much ease as:
  spreading butter on a slice of bread...
        but that's because when in england:
i'm wholly dedicated to the language,
   perhaps not the culture which i mimic -
but i have allegiance to that ******* comfy
armchair that's the english language.
- i remember this one incident of being
thrown out from a local pub on the grounds
that i "launched a glass pint in rage across
the pub floor" - xenophobia tickle -
                 i spoke too much like oliver reed
to one schizophrenic and some other lost soul...
a few days later i tap the shoulder
    of one of the bar mistresses and ask her
if she's feeling o.k., if you want
a depiction of constipation, you should have
seen her, she has harbouring a hedgehog in
her *** by that point...
          a complete ******* of a pub anyway...
you see, even with an acquired accent,
if the question is asked: where you from,
and you say: not from around here,
   even if you've lived here pretty much
all of your life: you're not puritanical enough...
mind you... i'm the pedigree breed,
surrounded by mongrels...
                 i am, but a mongrel of the soul
nurturing an adopted tongue, while
   "trying" my hardest to forget my native tongue...
*******, i'm not going to turn into
a terrorist, which, by the way,
english society has bred...
                  polish is not omnipresent -
it's not the king-quack-**** sitting on
the throne of hippo-******* that's
the meridian - you have you dream,
taken from the spanish -
       die ***** von sonnezunge
ständig suchen  für die mond:
       die schlaflosigkeitreich -
the empire of (the) sun-tongue -
perpetually looking for the moon -
  insomniac empire.
      hell, have it, maybe by having it
you can have your, little elaborations
of the dream fabric...
             point being:
my native tongue is an equivalent of
the iron maiden by comparison...
       the merovingian was wrong:
you truly wipe your *** with silk
by speaking english...
                notably by introducing the
amputee R's worth of trill to sound old-school
and a knowledge of latin always helps...
but nothing quiet comes across
as speaking the native tongue better than
the natives...
        i think that's called ambition...
      or a heckling of some sort -
a heckling where no one is staged or is
telling a joke...
                   a bit like being generous
to the turk and his predicament...
  he owns a store, the local council comes
to him, he literally has a caravan outside the store...
and he's worrying about employing
lawyers to solve the matter, he doesn't
know what the problem is...
two bottles of wine and some coca cola
and i peer outside: ah!
         so i tell him: you're obstructing
an item of public property...
  the simple answer is that you have to
revise your makeshift caravan shanty and
expose that bench...
did i get a thank you, or a free bottle of
whiskey... turks... what do you expect,
  he thanked me by increasing the price of beer...
if people older than me have no
standards of etiquette - why even expect
any study of ethics? you first learn aesthetic,
then you learn etiquette,
    and then comes ethics...
         you think i bought anything from
him ever again? loser.
     - became a corporate ***** -
but then again at 16 quid a litre of ms. amber scot,
i can't complain.
                  - but come one,
you've been given free legal advice and
you can't even repay a debt of being given
advice... ah... i see...
it would have made the proprietor look
                     stupid, i.e.: d'uh! a bench!
funny you should ask (without even asking):
whenever i go back to poland i feel grounded...
nay, cushioned - after all i am not there
to visit my countrymen as such,
   more or less imbued with a sense of
proximity to my neighbours,
  the germans, the czechs, the white russians,
lithuanians and the ukrainians....
               and to read a book...
but mostly about feeling the vicinity of
the neighbours...
                      and inhale a breath of
authenticity, in historical terms...
                     because back in england -
  well i have a patriotism for the language:
but not the people -
                    the language i can cherish -
the people mean diddly-squat to me...
  after being barred from a pub on false accusation,
well... expect any different?
                if only i were black,
i could call that racism...
                        alas, i have the ****** luck
of the irish...
                 then again...
                                       none of this even matters
beyond a squabbling defaced impression
of a memory...
                              it still stands:
i'm comfortable writing, since i deem
english to be an armchair -
               but the nativspreschen i find
as an iron maiden...
            although when wholly immersed
in an environment when the only words
in english you hear are: weekend, etc. -
                     there's this aura of oddity that
surrounds me:
         either i'm a ghost among the living -
or i'm alive, immersed in ghost town...
i can never tell...
                           all in all:
continental air is so refreshing having spent
an entire year on an island...
   the almost complete lack of moisture,
the crispness of dry cool,
           the crackling of the foot on snow
in imitation of walking on egg shells -
  and the mere snow - notably falling crisply
during the night...
            islanders are a very strange people...
whether the british, the icelanders,
the maltese, the cypriots, the irish,
                        you name them...
                      islanders have this knack at
believing themselves to be superior
to kontinentalvolk -
       notably when it comes to the basic
etiquette of tourism...
                  in was in paris, twice...
each time i had the luck of a fellow tourist
who spoke french...
                                     once it was this
italian girl, another a canadian girl with
russian roots: a pole's luck, i guess.

the time it takes to travel from
ostrowiec świętokrzyski...
mein klein
        scheisseloch
               aus geburtdorf - - - - - - - - - - - -

arriving at Stansted airport...
at the passport
    hall...

    achtung bitte...
then some Spanish...
and at last English...
i almost forget where i was...

i was about to write an epic...
saturated with so little
of thought...
but, alas... bombarded
by two shots of bourbon,
distracted by
something found between

a mountain, a chair,
a man and a fern
(yes, a cat... sleeping in my bed)...

imagine being sober for
over a month!
  imagine!
one IPA beer throughout
the "tenure" of holy holy holy

- - - - - - - - - - -
   my little ****-hole
                       from, birth-village

       what?!
i'm not going to learn German
being so god-**** entrenched in
Englisch and Schlavikschisch...
"too many consonants"...
that's what the English colts
used to say seeing western
Slavic for the first time...
"too many" consonants...

    sounds like "t'oo mime'any"
    pronouns in the post-Germanicus
post-isch              Eisland...

EPIC! EPIC!
over a month sober and...
new year's resolution?

  don't visit a brothel...
buy vinyls...
   and visit that
gresham publishing company
in London...
with the collection
of Dickens...

     - - - - - - - -
(Kandinsky / *******... all over
zis grossenwahn...
great delusion)

   but the time it takes to
travel by coach from
   ostrowiec świętokrzyski to Warsaw?
see...

  you never appreciate certain
types of music genres in
certain places...
opera... where do you listen to opera?
in an operhauß!

            pierdolone kacapy!
rho si si... si si kurva... si i zawsze ja!
    ия
                  siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
                  jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

pierdu pierdu: a.i.

        never mind, not today...
not straight off the boat type of...
"poem"...
just a blitzkrieg...
like any blitzkrieg...
reactionary?
                          that blinking
sensation...
        EPI                   LEP           (P)SY    

(we'll come onto greek in
a minute...
just one letter...

oh much much prior to
the antithesis of sudoku,
i.e. mahjong,
               solitaire...
   the OTHER,                    NPC...
finite model theory...
                    heinz-dieter ebbing)  

point being?
jazz? a bedroom and a cafe...
classical music though?

grand architecture or...
the most mundane "there"
   with a crooked mirror of
"being", with what remains:
   das ist:                   da ist nicht!

meine! oder ohne mir!

                      und es ist...
  und es ist...
                          
  the compedium of man's surmount
in but a few words made
totem, god, beast or with a mask
to guise a face upon a lake,
a moon delving into Monday,
a scythe into the sickle
and the plums of fortune
come August's choir of wheat...

a trickle of the poetic,
a tickling of the drunk...
  
  and here in England they cared for
what became dyslexic
hyperinflated:
yoga granny yog'ha
             for the pronoun:
who what where?
      basic... 2 i see two i too c to see
'ere i wh'       her i err
who i... go when?

when is pronoun!
   times what?
who!
when times what equals who!

woo woo woo...

a whole month speaking nothing
but ****** with my grandparents...
drop my tongue into
a barrel of bourbon...
of course i'll exfoliate!

   - and i liked classical music prior...
but...
hmm...
sitting there in the coach,
decided to chose a letter...

i once did this "thought experiment"
while studying the chemically
enchanced marijuana
of post hippy post pink floyd England...
skunk...
how to... pseudo-Buddha...
not think...
seek the holy grail... the third eye...
same **** different cover
*******...

        mind you...
it did work...
where did my thinking unbecome
narration?
oh... right... poetry and
the prophecies of the weather forecast:
the solid 5 minutes
of fame ordained to surpass
the 15 already promised
by Dandy W.

              classical music...
sitting uncomfortably?
good...
now you need a coach trip...
and...

ideal timing...
from
   ostrowiec świętokrzyski
to Warsaw you can listen to
robert schumann's

   fantastical tracks op. 12,
   arabeska c-dur op. 18,
                 childhood's scenes op. 15,
     forest scenes op. 82

and
     beethoven's
     IX symphony d-mol op. 125...
entering Warsaw...
like some vague...
comedy of... Wagner...
        luftwaffezunahme...

orgasmusrittwalküregodemicheservus
­
and i just said there...
most uncomfortable...
  Λ...
                 no... not a syllable...
Λ...
                   two eyes...
and a pin-point...
   on the forehead...
a missing, a hush, no narrative...
a "meditation"
(now, that's ambitious)...

  lambda...

                no... not O(micron,
or     -mega)...
  
           Λ...
  an... "effect"...
   (yes yes, either an ambiguity,
or a misnomer, that "     "     capsule)

         how did i notice Λ?

the digital clock in the coach,
i wanted to encapsulate...
something given,
a priori...

                           not this:
a posteriori mesh mish mash U O MSH,
this perpetual synthesis
of an acquired tongue...

i wanted to block
a meaning...
so i tuned into the music...
   and began blanking, stare-matching
waterfalls to staircaseas...

it began with

   14 : 30

14 : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
      : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
         : : : : : : : : : : 14 : 31

after a while i deviate
from even minding
the : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
      : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
   : : : : : : : : : :
         : : : : : : : : : :
  count

   ⠃  b
       ⠅     k
⠭    x
                ⠃ 2

after a while?

    given the λ-effect?

  well... y... h... λ... μ...

              what the hell
is north is there is no
actual Copernican "north"?

sure... the earth isn't flat...
but "where" the hell is
"north" in the Copernican
scheme of things?!
there isn't one, is, there?

hence the blurry:

   magic number on calculator
screens in math class in school:

8008135:
              8, ∞, S, 5, rune, sharpened,
etc.
    ∞, 8: 5 S...

                        5318008: *******!

IO:3Γ

                  1b:6B

              chess?
     poker?
                                bridge?

IZ:ZS (12:25)...

                       over a month spent
sober... with an exception
of watching the Decalogue
8 or 9...
                    (kieślowski) -
with an IPA...
                              (indian pale ale)...

23rd. of November 2018...
i can still remember
sitting on a barstool next to her,
sipping a Guinness...
at 7am...

   i've never seen a woman
read two pages of a book
for so long in my life...
well... attempt to read a book...
contantly checking
her phone...

                 it's hard to feel ashamed
drinking in the morning
in an airport,
surrounded by hefty
***** in a bunch
heading off for a bachelor
party
with one dressed in
Pampers...

                          but i kept
her company...
   **** me...
                       23rd November
2018...
           a lot must have happened
since then...

              she sooner
finished her pint of lager,
i my pint of Guinness,
she checked her phone
more times than i blinked...
and still...
she only managed to
turn only one page
of a book...

     bad luck... 'Dannielle'...
a book, an airport,
a morning cover?
        
   - but i've never seen a person
take so much time to turn
over a page or two
of a book...
this is hardly a place
to call into question
a conversation starter:
so watch'ah reading?
is it?

    didn't think so...
   books, now, then, 10 years ago...
and now...
bypassing standard bearers...
Urban II sorts...
   books as items of nouveau vogue
attaches...

   sorts:
   kippahs of the trendy
Brooklyn sort...

            
hell: **** it... let's wreck this
like a Machine Head song
akin to bulldozer...

   if Pandora had a box...
Eureka had an attic.

The Great Mughals
      The Stansted Inn
             Nadia and I speak
                     Research to begin
                               Names for Fame
                                        Poetry from within


                    Starlight wandering
                            and Encounterin’

in love we disappear
Montreal's Leonard Cohen

late along in London
singin', ringin', knowin'

I've seen London too
stayed the Stansted Inn

Medieval women Muslim mystics
I discuss with my new friend

                   Nadia
Mohammed, Khadija and the poets
         Peace be unto them.

10 million cases and all them in the wrong airport
sort of makes holidays a bust,
but maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick
maybe this is about the sick cases
faces hidden behind a mask,

I'll ask Google.

yep
it's due to Corona and not down to Stansted or Orly,

from Banstead to Chorley
points North and South,
a good idea is to cover
your mouth,

don't be one of those cases
in an ambulance
or an airport,
stay safe, out of reach,

unless you're one of those tossers
who toss trash on the beach
then you're doomed.

I am drawn to Catholic England:
Tolkien, Hopkins, Sting

Went to Mass once in Westminster
Saw that Poet's Corner thing

Oxford in time's twilight
Wetheral in Spring

The Stansted Inn, shall we begin?
My dear, have you the ring?

                     Marry me!

In London with Samantha James
In Stansted in my little room
                   2020 vision

Looking for Jacob von Hogflume!

Julian's vision for Eliot
1373

Churchill's badass speech
My policy? Victory!

I have been to Wetheral
And Oxford twilight I did see

At the Stansted Inn
I spent a night or two or three

Stratford for an afternoon
William, did you see me?

Because I saw you in Staunton
You live on Americanly!