"surnames" poems
This is about my beloved physiotherapist.
He tried his best to help me recover quick.
And today the initial period is reminiscent.
Dr. Amrinder Singh Kaler,
My generous physiotherapist,
Has a rather rare surname.
I used to enquire his name,
As I was extremely curious,
Much like a kid I had been.
Brain injury took heavy toll,
Severely quick memory loss,
At times I used to forget it all.
All day long I was apprehensive & confused,
Scared I remained thinking of physical pain,
I would ask them if someone would come.
I would ask him his name during therapy,
My memory was extremely short & poor,
I slowly learnt his first & second names.
But I would still ask him his surname,
I was not be told straight away by him,
He told me to strain my mind & guess it.
To tell him his own name was not easy,
Especially when I was so much in pain,
It was so much difficult for me to tell it.
But after few months' passage,
It didn't pain much to exercise,
As much as when I was worse.
I found it difficult to recall his surname,
I did say several Sikh surnames to him,
I would say all surnames but his own.
Nov 15, 2013
Nov 15, 2013 at 10:48 PM UTC
Priti Patel's quote on EU migration - whatever it was...
list of common surnames: cropper, cross, crouch,
dabney, dalton, daniels, eads, easton, eccleston,
fairclough, farnham, fay, gardner, garey, garfield,
haight, hanes, hailey, ibbott, irvin, isaacson,
jack, jackson, jacobs, kay, keen, kelsey,
lacey, lacy, lamar, macey, mann, marchand,
neal, nelson, neville... sure pati japati patel -
i'll be an albino in Gujarat
if your play the sitar in a sari;
but your name sounds a bit migrant
revealing, what a weird 'back of the bus'
you seem to stand on -
you want the Mongolians resurrected?
i swear we were being ousted in line
of what Queen Sheba said to Solomon:
'olive skinned throughout the geography
and the unwelcome green men on
sponged-knickers creaming for an ******
a french dessert...'
yes pretty prior, you found home on a
continent when half of the european nations
didn't practice colonial antics -
i guess it's easier to pick on them.
but with a Patel surname you sound british
already, the great experiment worked
the anaesthetic of former colonialism
numbed via recreational Ketamine use
really numbed the skull and jaw mandibles -
i hate, i hate being conscripted into
post-colonial affairs of "why it all failed"
what a waste of the urban hubs of
Manchester or Liverpool -
where once artistic expression thrived -
i hate these post-colonial societies,
it's as if they were castrated en masse,
and they're wondering why no one has a permanent
suntan in scandinavia - maybe the raw herring diet -
cinnamon up your *** magician's trick with
space between fudge of digestion, disappearing trick
but then the cough that blinds you sweetly -
i guess post-colonial nationalism wanted to
listen to non-colonial nationalism -
a former migrant like pretty plated smell
olive skinned exploited inversion of angers
but dunked a footstep into a trip-up
with non-colonial nations -
a bit like the greek bail-out - pretty patel
is a name least likely associated with migration;
you teasing the beast out?
Apr 21, 2016
Apr 21, 2016 at 9:33 PM UTC
Brought up by the stain of my surnames identity
I wiped away my face to see the mask of my vulnerability
I scrounged up the pieces to make this body whole
So, does this body still seem deficient like its told?
Repetition of mistakes, my benevolence believes
Brought up by love but then left to just leave
like the horizons where too distant for me to reach
thus, I pose pondering whats easy to achieve
Not because ambitions were little and in between
but because the sea bed was given the name beauty queen
Something no one else sees is known to be prettier then me
So, I'm left to subjection, my minds yearning to plead
Oct 23, 2013
Oct 23, 2013 at 5:26 PM UTC
take money out of the equation, and sack all the waiters and return to tribalism, the former statement of non-intellectual socialism, the sort of inherent: in us there is a togetherness, no more service from strangers in the hierarchy of enriching a piece of metal or a wavy rectangle of paper with “necessary” symbolism of authority of the status quo... but that’s not going to happen... the pickpocket picts are no more... the normalising normans glared at the hastings pinnacle and integrated with the saxon women... the saracens became surnames in poland... actually that last one is very true... a branch of my family has the surname saracen.
so i’m reading this article
and i’m hardly debasing myself,
it’s not that i’m referring
to sartre’s negation of certain things
whether animate and essential or
inanimate and existential... in that formula:
i deny therefore i am... because i can’t deny my existence...
and 2000 years down the line i’ll be pitchfork
argument in an atheist’s mouth anyway (nothing is certain in the realm of cognition, hence the cartesian invocation of doubt),
it's not like i'm referring to inappropriate pronoun usage...
so **** a doodle do... twang the strings on the mandolin...
i’m referring to this classical reference of the shy literary figure
unable to spark conversation with strangers...
god, i really love strangers, and talking to them!
why? there is no personal history, there’s no past,
there are no reference points... it’s just the moment and nothing else,
the perfect anonymity project...
not the matrix philosophy (easily invoked because
it has a flimsy plot-line and loads of images...
just what the doctor ordered for the english speaking masses
with a very naked orthography - i.e. if it’s on the internet
it’s not “real life...” as is this computer i’m using
it’s not even here!)
of using the deep web to join the rats and etc.;
i love talking to strangers, i can forget myself
and enter the realm of discretion about how within randomisation
of eggshell, yoke and cockroach there’s also the randomisation
of the interactants to balance out the need for a theological unit, god...
it’s great... it’s like... it’s like... life.
defining the genre of biography proper? never backtrack...
always sidetrack... i can’t be bothered living a life with cocktail parties
and romps and romantic comedies to look forward to
once all the animalism becomes domesticated and a
gym-session complaints column in a newspaper.
Oct 26, 2015
Oct 26, 2015 at 7:54 PM UTC
When I walk alone I walk like a fighter ready to fight and everyone shift to let me move on .
When I walk with my partner I walk like a king and look at her like my Queen.
Smiling, shaking hands ,hugging each other like a kids playing tennis ball rolling down fighting to catch it with their hands.
Being respected by everyone ,Mr and Mrs become our first names followed by our surnames.
Every creature said wow what a wonderful couple.
Families bond together like no separation will take place.
Unhappy times one will walk two meters from another ,like they naver met each other.
After a while ,where a thunderstorm destroyed it return to finish the work it started
Walking distance is painful.
Keep walking together
Far is where we come from
If we look back we will never reach our journey
Jun 5, 2016
Jun 5, 2016 at 11:39 AM UTC
Deep earthen roots, gold arrow-tips,
Sounding rush of green applause
Now, trees and bark stretch to
Higher lows of raptured skies.
Wide face of etched ranks and--
Here His marks tread and silence falls
Quite tenderly under winding timber,
Woodworks, Tree-rings, bound around
As clocks tick to celestial Grange's face.
His deeds show across baked-ancients
And those whose sun came creeping under
Horizontal terms and periods-- in lapses
when Time held his own--
On winding old branches with buds smelling
Young n' green n' poking free from yellow scars,
Time garnered his people, his children and dead,
housed them in ticks and tocks and surnames,
For Twilight's enamelled hubris to bathe them,
Wash them.
To set them in winding bark,
And brand them in Himself,
In Winding Tree-tocks.
Nov 5, 2017
Nov 5, 2017 at 9:52 AM UTC
When I was seven I summoned spirits with an Ouija board and shadow-souls
guided my hands towards the letter 'S' after I asked, in my defining romantic
fashion, "who is man I fall in love with?"
I made a list of Seth and Sam and Scott until I envisioned names in languages
that have never danced on my tongue and surnames that sound like writings
out of fairy tales.
I like to think that my musing and poems and all the fantasy-oriented writings
I've produced have all been about this ambiguous 'S'.
Though I'm in awe over how out of sync the hemispheres of my brain need to
be for the logical to collide with the fantasy. Because there are about 6,800 to
6,900 bodies of words and systems in today's modern civilization and most, if
not all, have to contain the letter 'S'.
The odds of me discovering the function of two sets of 206 bones laying perfectly
still on a spring mattress together with a boy called 'S' are probable and far from
my illusion.
All in all I've misconstrued my perception of infatuation and love based on what
I chose to believe that night I used a telephone of sorts to contact dead lovers,
who watch over the living to see the anatomical parts they don't have anymore
collide with each other.
I love the boy called "S".
My writing has and always will be about the boy called 'S'. And when I find the boy
called 'S', I won't mention any of this because I'm well aware of how daft this all sounds.
Of how I allowed ghosts to untangle the read thread tied to my left ring finger
and lead me to the other end of the string.
Oct 13, 2013
Oct 13, 2013 at 11:57 PM UTC
When people hear Smith they don’t see the real meaning,
They see a old English conqueror with armor gleaming,
or even a tall black man with dice in the mirror,
but what Smith really means, is you’re a creator.
To smith means to build, to create and stabilize,
like castle walls scaling miles high,
And I mean I follow my surnames meaning,
but.. it’s kind of a different wall I’m creating.
It’s still made of bricks, mortar and sweat,
but let me get into the details a little bit.
The Bricks;
The bricks are made up of all the lies you told me that night,
that smile, and kiss that you told me would set things right,
when really all it did was feel like a poisonous bite,
that spread like a cancer and clouded my sight,
until everything in the world saw me through a curtain of spite.
The Mortar;
the scars on my skin
The Sweat;
The sweat is the tears that sunk in,
the tears from hiding in my room thinking my friends were just ghosts,
and that no one would ever say I Love You the most.
I became the best smith the world had ever known,
seeing how no one noticed how high my walls had grown,
because even though they were jagged and fierce,
they were hidden by a beauty that no eye could pierce.
So now the smith sits behind his wall in full armor,
wondering if anyone ever will conquer,
or burn down these walls and tear them asunder,
who knew the true meaning of Smith..
would be such a blunder.
May 29, 2014
May 29, 2014 at 6:38 PM UTC
The Funniest Word: Sesquipedalian: Long-Winded
I just learned the strangest word:
An adjective ne’er seen or heard.
Sesquipedalian.
Sesqui-pedal-ian:
Are we the aliens depicted?
Is it us the word has painted?
Latin for a foot plus half**
Which makes me laugh.
“Polysyllabic or long-winded”.**
If there ever was a winding
Longish ended word, it is sesquipedalian.
You have to laugh
At something that’s a ‘foot plus half’
That uses fourteen signs to say it.
‘Sesquipedalian names, or prose’
God only knows how long is wrong,
And even, what is wrong with ‘long’!
Eighteen inches, fourteen letters.
Something in the letters fetters.
Words are born from situations:
Every nuance. each emotion.
How they come about’s the question.
Are we so observant, we,
Disposed to live linguistically?
I’ve no idea,
But it sure is
****** funny.
**18 inches or 45.72 centimeters.
The Funniest Word: Sesquipedalian 9.27.2020 A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin
sesquipedalian | ˌsɛskwɪpɪˈdeɪlɪən |
adjective formal
(of a word) polysyllabic; long: sesquipedalian surnames.
• characterized by long words; long-winded: the sesquipedalian prose of scientific journals.
ORIGIN
mid 17th century: from Latin sesquipedalis ‘a foot and a half long’, from sesqui- (see sesqui-) + pes, ped- ‘foot’.
Sep 27, 2020
Sep 27, 2020 at 6:56 AM UTC
We are what our parents' parents
taught them to fear.
The atom of liberated thought,
the shallow, the queer, the lazy.
We are what our fathers were not,
or what they never had the ***** to be.
We are united by the hypothesis
of instant pleasure.
We are measured by dollar signs,
nickels, dimes, roaring down
Penny Lane blaring hip-hop,
dropping the surnames and
blaming the slave trade for
the stains on our rap sheets.
We are what comes after the comma
in the history book sentence,
sentenced to life in mind-drug prison.
Listen!
We are going nowhere but forward.
We are the generation of disorder,
hoarders of unrealized potentials
who cross borders
just to say we did so.
We are the flame of ******* science
turning your bibles into embers.
We are the generation that
remembers to forget.
Let us take an inch and we will
turn it into a mile so you can
watch us march down it single-file
while you pray to god we don't
make it to Capitol Hill.
You know we will.
Listen!
We are the generation.
May 26, 2018
May 26, 2018 at 12:00 AM UTC
it’s the old Schengen Theory in psychology,
casually utilise vowels as pronouns,
but then theorise ancient pronouns
as theory based non-vowels: the self (germanic / invading)
and the ego (latin / origins of still using a - z)...
then apply the ditto membrane concern for space,
which will provide you with all the time in the world
to go back from the practical into theoretical that’s
free from having empirical theory interacting with the empirical practice
known as the sedative of life: mistake: life: en route death: life: some
other mistake:
life: don’t know: life: maybe tomorrow: life: maybe never: life:
i wish: life: well at least my saturday is occupied with movies;
they did the trick of of theorising you wearing a suit and doing it
commando in the missing underwear by structuring
an impetus to pause with stating: i said
äußern sjalrf
id scribo;
it’s still a contest... heavyweight champ rom apex jr.
is fighting alarik orca schrei - with the former fighting to get rid
of ‘ from e, and the latter to attach : to u to make ü:
oddly enough the saracens in sicily were
slavs who wrote ę and ą... otherwise it's all geographically
adequate to push rome down from the top,
with the majority of accents coming above the a, b, c... zee...
although the western slavs were an oddity in that respect...
but then a part of my family is said to have been
hungarian or czech... with surnames like batuk and not
batóg... and the cousin of some cousin
marrying my great-grandfather's sister ending up
with the surname saracen... it's a shame i can't
join in the festivities of the 21st century humanity
because of jealousy that didn't mature to the extent
i wished it had... and the god that suddenly appeared
from the ashen tabernacle of the holocaust in the night:
antichrist to satan... guess what, milton was completely wrong...
i went in there to steal the blood of the messiah
signposted wine... and i came back with blackcurrant juice!
can you believe it?
satan to the antichrist: well thank **** that you didn't
choose the bread... i came back with the apple of eden
and it turned to ash... god knows what the bread of the
messiah would have turned into.
anti-buddha: hallucinogenic mushrooms...
(insert laughter among duck noises).
Nov 7, 2015
Nov 7, 2015 at 9:12 PM UTC
Where will I go when I am dead?
Will I get the chance to rest my head,
to finally find a comfort to sleep,
to make up for the lovers
I have failed to keep?
Will I meet my father at the end?
Where fragments gather and come to mend-
all of these pieces that I have been,
all broken strings, false surnames,
and sights left unseen.
Will I come to say what was never said,
or else forsake these words for your open bed?
In death, will there come a feeling I have missed,
through this fear of living,
this drunken, tearful mist?
I light up a joint on the cemetery walk,
skimming the tombstones with swollen eyes.
Whether pen or print, engraving or chalk,
will some higher truth sustain me
beyond a life of erosion and lies;
will any of these misguided words
make it through to more tolerable times?
Dec 6, 2014
Dec 6, 2014 at 1:35 PM UTC
They rarely bother to mow here anymore,
Once a month, perhaps every other
(Times are tight, full burials being pretty much
A thing of the past these days)
Though it’s unlikely anyone would notice
If the grass grew a bit longish,
Or the crownvetch and crabgrass became a little more prevalent,
No one being buried in this part of the cemetery
For the better part of a hundred years now,
The stones bleached and faded from decades of sleet and sunlight
And acid rain from the auto plants of Flint and Lorain and South Bend,
(Now boneyards for gears and drill bits themselves)
Those names still legible on the teetering, unsteady stones
Mostly the stolid Scotch-Irish surnames
Vaguely familiar from the town’s founding generation
Found on its street signs or pocket-parks,
Their descendants mostly having fled to friendlier climes,
Though the odd lesser strain of the families remain
(Not that they would choose to pay tribute to those ancestors
To whom they have fared so poorly in comparison)
Though many more bear the family names of their trades,
Clusters of Coopers, Weavers, and Smiths,
Their stones bearing the sentiments of grim Victorian fatalism,
Thus in mercy early call’d away or The happy soul is that which fled.
Such thoughts are quaint, eccentric things to us now,
As would be the clothes they wore, the songs they sung,
But we would know them nonetheless,
Know the muted joy of their minor successes,
The depth and finality of their defeats,
The sting of bowing and scraping
To the owners of the mill, the haughty town fathers,
As they served them at the milliners or the drug store,
Their odd, fleeting dreams of grandeur having come to rest here,
Cherry-lidded as they proceed to dust.
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 at 9:35 AM UTC
Can’t shut my eyes
Can’t miss a sound
Even if it’s lies
I want to hear it—I found
I catch titles, labels
Can’t stand that
My head is wired with cables
But I feel like an acrobat
Balancing between
Either being unheard
Or unseen
"Politics" is just a word
But it makes me grasp for air
Whenever I hear it voiced
Perceive it as if I am not there
Yearning to belong and be rejoiced
Nevertheless, I pay attention
To all the names and surnames
I feel a tension
My brain’s on fire, I can’t calm the flames
Jun 7, 2025
Jun 7, 2025 at 4:03 PM UTC
i'm not writing this for "brownie points",
but i think i've been compensated
somehow -
yes, my father was abandoned by his
parents, and was raised by
his grandparents,
i managed to meet my paternal
grandfather, but my paternal grandmother?
i actually don't know what she
looks like... last time i heard she was
living in silesia...
but? i've had my share of compensation...
much more i guess of a fair share...
i had, on that count:
a maternal grandmother, and two
surrogate grandmothers...
the surrogates? both jewish
(my mother was a carer for these two
jewish ladies) -
what were their names?
**** i can only remember their surnames
a mrs. rockman & a mrs. roßhandler...
i remember coming back from primary
school and eating tea at their houses...
nice old ladies: as all old & frail women
are...
i received a complete collection of
bernard shaw upon graduating from school
from mrs. rockman...
poor **** died demented, and ******** herself
in bed... she'd be more likely to tell
you some obscure fact, than what time
of day it was, or what day or month or year
it was...
dementia? i call that free-fall -
the complete un-inhibition of what is otherwise
restricted free-will: i.e. minding some sort
of manners - theoretically speaking?
beautiful to imagine - in reality? terrible
to watch.
so yeah, w.w. II compensation -
the germans only gave jews money,
the poles? well: someone like my mother -
who was a carer to two old jewish women...
sometimes money has the same
compensation worth as handing the victim
a piece of sharp iron and looking
into the eyes of the culprit...
so yeah... not a bad deal to have made,
certainly not a faustian pact -
mrs. rockman & mrs. roßhandler:
the latter, if i remember correctly,
escaped via warsaw sewers, with diamonds
sown into her garments...
i inherited some of my ******* books
from mrs. rockman, given that i visited her more
than her grandchildren...
and my surrogate grandfather's
monte cassino cross of honour...
my maternal grandfather had honorary
had civic distinction, some soviet form of
meritocratic "diversion" -
crosses, sure, but the problem is,
as he still reminds me whenever i see him:
you walked out the house wearing them,
like little general, and the other kids took
them off you, now all i have are proofs that
i earned them, paper proofs, where are my medals,
you little fiend, you pawned then...
well oops, i didn't get any skittles or
marbles for them either.
Aug 23, 2017
Aug 23, 2017 at 7:03 PM UTC
A year away January twen'y-twenty.
The people of december
had changed their surnames.
Mr. and Mrs. Deceased.
Jan 31, 2021
Jan 31, 2021 at 8:49 AM UTC