Goodbye Prague, to a city I never thought I'd know.
Goodbye Prague, to a heaven that is lined with shattered beer bottles and stamped out cigarettes the junkies and the hobo's here still manage to get a  few puffs out of.
Goodbye Prague, to a hell that was once hovering with the feelings of control, manipulation, and more control, but now is twirling top speed to a land unknown.
Goodbye Prague, you seductive ***** with your cheap liquor, beer, and cigarettes, smelling of aged mahogany mixed finely with an acidic burst of fresh *****.
Goodbye Prague, I do not know when I will see you again, but I hope that I do and that I never grow so old that I forget you.
Goodbye to your abstract animals smeared black, screaming in the exploding summer sun. Goodbye to freshly cut pigs heads and cow flesh, hanging in your storefront window, tempting every passerby like the *****'s of Amsterdam.
Goodbye to every cobblestone that shines after a fresh rain or snow, slippery to the newcomer, an annoyance to the amateur, thoughtless to the old timer.
Goodbye to the potraviny's stocked with two crown marked up ***** and space vegetables shaped and colored in a one and only kind of vernacular; without you, I would have half-drunkenly stumbled home towards dreams of menial headaches and shadowy beer or perhaps to The Oak to drink alone.
I scream so long through faint puffs of carbon nicotine clouds made illuminated by the icy orange street lamps 800 years old glow!
I scream so long to late metro's and early trams!
I scream so long to the roaring rocks who reflect the faces of aging clocks!
So long to passed out bums and unforgiving metro officers. So long to dollar fifty beers and the fear of getting deported. So long with counting silver crown to make even, seeing my math prowess has lessened. So long embedded needles and bottle caps deep within the snowy cobble. So long listless wanders all their money thrown away until the month of May comes to knock on their door. So long alleyway romance 100 crown notes and old men in their rickety fishermen boats. So long sad masked faces who in their forward march sit stunned seeing fortune picks only some. So long through the grey mist stabbed with neon signs that attract the youth and the mad. So long to the feeling everything I had to say was the wrong thing. So long to feelings of foreign familiarity whose ball and chain were slowly starting to rust away. So long in song to the player's of Riegrovy hill whose voices I just couldn't stand. So long I've come to understand everyone's got a choice to live or wish they did. So long to the wide swept hills of Petrin, where angel's of lore go to rest atop dusted fresh snow, among the dotted new born vine. So long to the sound of wet metal against metal, a scream of order carried on the blue man's shoulder. So long to a city whose architecture reminds me of old men's faces and whose color reminds me of elderly women's dresses. So long to smoking in front of children without a second thought for their health. So long to racism that is wicked, but grunted genially - the executioner smiles at the accused - the gravedigger's weep for the dead - the ant makes a break for a hill not his. So long forlorn love whose only remedy for a cure is the beer sitting in front of you. So long to wondering what's going on in the world, when all I want and got is what's right in front of me.
Farewell Prague, you shadowed street walker, a cloak of stars around you, finding all that owe you  your due.
Farewell Prague, you in the morning eyes half mast, snow crunching underneath stony white.
Farewell Prague, miss-handler of crooked time pieces stating the obvious, ignoring to blame bluntly on youthful alcohol abuse.
Farewell Prague, you took me up the hill and through the woods where ravens, black as gutter ice, crackled down at me like showers of New Year's fireworks.
Farewell Prague, you gave me peace where I once thought I was unable to have.
Farewell Prague, you befriended me, then ordered me a shot that made me cough, then ordered me a beer so we could sit and truly feel what it is to sit and wallow in our time here.
Farewell Prague, you entranced me with view after view to a city to stubborn to die.
Farewell Prague, I leave you like you would leave me.
Farewell Prague, to your fat snow flakes that drop into wide eyed children mouths, tasting of iron whiskey rye, though they do not flinch at the taste.
Farewell Prague, I leave you with a hush of a whimper, bitter as the cold, and indifferent as the server's over at Cafe Lourve.
Farewell Prague, with a thousand miles of graveyards, where ghosts barely have the strength to weep.
Farewell Prague, I admit I never knew how to love until I came to visit you.
Farewell Prague, as I stare out your cracked and smoky tram windows, my thoughts not my own, shop windows and naked, screaming men, their cigarettes bouncing in between their lips like a jack of spades on smack, where at last we see that life is only a worth a **** if lived.
Farewell Prague, I see the cards there on the table and you're winking at me while I stand at the backdoor, and what's more, there's a secret you've got to give that I refuse believe.
Farewell Prague, to your open sore catastrophe of society, KFC on every block, and Starbuck's on every other, and on the other other are the lined' wino's shaking open handed and spread for a case of cardboard vino.
Farewell Prague, to the nasty smoker's in trams that just stopped caring.
Farewell Prague, to a city rhythm generated by an ignorant originality and uniqueness, where the same has no name and the the plain jabber on about their jobs in their pretty blue jeans.
Farewell Prague, because to say goodbye would mean we don't have that friendly tone.
Farewell Prague, I see to sacrifice oneself for the comfort of the elder or the opposite fills me with agitated obligation stationed in a vessel older than I've ever lived - yet I know it, for it is me.
Farewell Prague, you are a lost lullaby caught in the wind of an elastic multi-colored pin-wheel, shining riches of the rainbow into the eyes of children, who all whistle when they snore.
Farewell Prague, a button upon the Earth, like every man.
Farewell Prague, a love song sung in the depths of a damp grey hall, rivers all around, so the sounds too much to drink were outlandish in high emotion, juvenile commotion.
Farewell Prague, we were young - not caring about the future, but of course, with worry in our hearts for worry is a sign of human being human; yet, still, we asked nothing of one another and you gave and I gave and you took and I took and we walked underneath one another's blanket's until we were no longer cold and the winter showed to be just an annoying individual at the party.
Farewell Prague, to your lack of complications, making simplicities acceptable again.
Farewell Prague, to the snow that never stops falling, all while slumbering within dream until the seam is ripped so the old can die.
Farewell Prague, I've shined every marble staircase and washed every tram window; you owe me nothing because I like you.
Farewell Prague, to the long nights bleeding away at the table alone, the lady fast asleep, lit by the dim orange glow of the twisted streetlights below.
Farewell Prague, to the long nights forgetting pains of existence and accepting every solution to ward of resistance.
Farewell Prague, our long talks and hovering walks, always forcing me to balk.
Farewell Prague, at last you got the praise you have always deserved.
Farewell Prague, to hot humid nights filled with *** and butter in the summer and cold bitten cold of ***** and juice a la winter.
Farewell Prague, to bad service but good drink and food.
Farewell Prague, you curious tale the bravest man would waver to say.
Farewell Prague, to bridges galore and more dead leaves then wrinkles on my crooked face.
Farewell Prague, at night the sheen of liquor wears off only if you let it be so.
Farewell Prague, to all the those lonely mornings bent head into book on the way to work.
Farewell Prague, how long till you grow to be young again?
Farewell Prague, how long till I admit my defeat to you?
Farewell Prague, how long until I accept I'm the last fool in this world?
Goodbye Prague, the last soldier is standing, but the war is not yet won.
Goodbye Prague, to your hazy stars glimmering and shining for an indebted audience.
Goodbye Prague, the sun breaking through ink spilled colored clouds, the birds chirping, the dogs barking, and us wondering where we started.
Goodbye Prague, your churches are empty so the sins of man run rampant and at last the prayers of men go unanswered; we now abandoned to fend for ourselves.
Goodbye Prague, the puncturing purity of your ways make me giggle in delight as I listen to the cool piano man play; his eyes on the horizon shattering like toppled china.
Goodbye Prague, at last there is a time where we both get what we want.
Goodbye Prague, the verandas are chilled with the dew of winter and the snow glitters like bitter diamonds as the fool tips his hat to shy away the sunlight.
Goodbye Prague, every rain drop that fell upon me was a gift you can never take away.
Goodbye Prague, the fool adheres to agnostic rules but the cruel here see no reason to sue.
Goodbye Prague, I think therefore the dust of escape reflects the waves of the river Vlatva.
Goodbye Prague, to your lack of vowels.
Goodbye Prague, when the night wavers hear the Beherovka weep into its own glass, love leaving her forever making no note to Kissy.
Goodbye Prague, tram driver's unforgiving in their merciless need for schedule.
Goodbye Prague, the last homage to the war standing like a shining diamond neath chipped and shattered rubble.
Goodbye Prague, a listless memory mentioned only in drifting dream.
Goodbye Prague, every loving glance smelling of freshly poured beer over newly fallen snow.
Goodbye Prague, to your hardness, your beauty, and your madness.
Goodbye Prague, your days wet with rain, stricken by sunlight, reflecting white emerald into the window panes of passing trains.
Goodbye Prague, at last you got what you deserved.
Goodbye Prague, now I can weep and say I have trampled upon your cheek and slunk through your veins and trudged through your blood and skipped through your hair and saw every line - both sought after and nought - you have acquired through time.
Goodbye Prague, there is no reason to get excited, you are free.
Goodbye Prague, I see the silhouette of the trees that line your hills and I am forsaken to see the leaves turning from jovial yellow greens to disregarded and disparaged furnaces of dim fire reds and browns.
Goodbye Prague, the people within you deserved all of the credit.
Good Prague, the people outside of you deserve what ever they believe they do.
Goodbye Prague, you family to families with common sense and love rampaging through your barley stained veins.
Goodbye Prague, perhaps there is nothing under your rubble, maybe already all is lost for everyone, everywhere, but maybe, you living the simpler life, can show all that life can be so.
Goodbye Prague, you gave me letters, words, lines, commas, apostrophes, and dashes, paragraphs, pages, and eventually, a story; I leave you marked.
Goodbye Prague, an old friend whose hand I shook but knew would one day turn my back on.
Goodbye Prague, the bite of your cold generosity and your bustling love leaves man with nothing but to bike back with no chance of triumph.
Goodbye Prague, street cleaners clean up your wear and tear from the mothers and fathers that bore you, some 800 years ago; ageless, you loom longer than they would like.
Goodbye Prague, battling sleep as the ***** raps for more and more, none that the man has.
Goodbye Prague, the night is curling in as the wave crashes to the short and I am the lost sun looking for a place to rise, trying to get to the sky.

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et *** illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.’

                For Ezra Pound
                il miglior fabbro


I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony *******? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
            Frisch weht der Wind
            Der Heimat zu
            Mein Irisch Kind,
            Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to ***** ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?
                          The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
                    Nothing again nothing.
                                                    ‘Do
‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
‘Nothing?’

    I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’
                                                     But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’
                             The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
hurry up please its time
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
hurry up please its time
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
hurry up please its time
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
hurry up please its time
hurry up please its time
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female *******, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

      The river sweats
      Oil and tar
      The barges drift
      With the turning tide
      Red sails
      Wide
      To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
      The barges wash
      Drifting logs
      Down Greenwich reach
      Past the Isle of Dogs.
                  Weialala leia
                  Wallala leialala

      Elizabeth and Leicester
      Beating oars
      The stern was formed
      A gilded shell
      Red and gold
      The brisk swell
      Rippled both shores
      Southwest wind
      Carried down stream
      The peal of bells
      White towers
                  Weialala leia
                  Wallala leialala

‘Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start’.
I made no comment. What should I resent?’
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of ***** hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’
              la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                                A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                               Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock wi

Trams



Knitted smoke
And rosary of towns  
Unspotted in the rear of the lazy sky
Dreams getting grasps lackeyed
And ***** moon branded with loneliness
Smile tiling what left pariah .
Those survives the end as a woundless dagger
Did anyone ever stands ?
In front of the smoke
When He enters the mind carousel
Speck in the line of windloot
A walk to vanishes ....
All dare to trip ,
After the sundown curfew
When we lost an another episode of terrors ....

The sun bakes down heavily on a plastic micro planet in Orlando, Florida
where crowded trams drop American bushels of tourists into an alien world.
Quickly fantasy comes alive
through a corporation of disguise.
The workers mask themselves in a drapery of familiar life
-like costumes to charm little children’s hearts.
They smile wildly, carving a clear dimple line on the but of their cheeks. Walt’s Disney World
must have driven every one of America’s circuses out of business.
The flying trapeze is too elegant,
people now want to be strapped in,
buckled up and whipped around
to forcibly experience the true velocity of entertainment.
Even the participant’s attire is geared for this third world oblivion. Neon ***** packs rest like bloated kangaroo pouches
on fat sweaty old lady’s round hips, their plump fingers
holding on to leashed harnesses reined to their child’s small chest.
This is vacation,
strangers of people in massive conglomerations
with confused expressions and burnt faces.
Even the food seems wickedly unnatural,
like an artificial order of burning plastic and sour dough surprise.
Waiting is the enthusiast’s pastime as parades
of anxious voyeurs are captivated by a trance
fixation of lights and whistles.
They line up like schools of lemming,
plunging on rides,
one by one.

This is the place
Where memories are made
And dreams come true

--To Elizabeth Robins Pennell


'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!'--Fantasio.

Once on a time
There was a little boy:  a master-mage
By virtue of a Book
Of magic--O, so magical it filled
His life with visionary pomps
Processional!  And Powers
Passed with him where he passed.  And Thrones
And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,
Thronged in the criss-cross streets,
The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,
Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,
Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul
Pavilioned jealously, and hid
As in the dusk, profound,
Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.--

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!
A flickering ****** of memory that floats
Upon the face of a pool of darkness five
And thirty dead years deep,
Antic in girlish broideries
And skirts and silly shoes with straps
And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks
Plain in the shadow of a church
(St. Michael's:  in whose brazen call
To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),
Sedate for all his haste
To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,
Inciting still to quiet and solitude,
Boarded in sober drab,
With small, square, agitating cuts
Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,
Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .
What but that blessed brief
Of what is gallantest and best
In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?
The Book of rocs,
Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,
Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,
And ghouls, and genies--O, so huge
They might have overed the tall Minster Tower
Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!
In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,
Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade
The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,
Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,
And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk--
Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms--
Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles,
The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many--kindly and grim
Familiars, cronies quaint
And goblin!  Never a Wood but housed
Some morrice of dainty dapperlings.  No Brook
But had his nunnery
Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,
To cabin in his grots, and pace
His lilied margents.  Every lone Hillside
Might open upon Elf-Land.  Every Stalk
That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed
Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs
You climbed beyond the clouds, and found
The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged
And drowsy, from his great oak chair,
Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,
Called for his Faery Harp.  And in it flew,
And, perching on the kitchen table, sang
Jocund and jubilant, with a sound
Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals
The shy thrush at mid-May
Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;
Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,
In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,
For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,
And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass
The half-door where the cobbler sat in view
Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,
In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,
Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know
Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched
His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists
And elbows.  In the rich June fields,
Where the ripe clover drew the bees,
And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind
Lolled his half-holiday away
Beside me lolling and lounging through my own,
'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son
On his white horse along the leafy lanes;
For at his stirrup linked and ran,
Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped
From wall to wall above the espaliers,
But in the bravest tops
That market-town, a town of tops, could show:
Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail
A banner flaunted in disdain
Of human stratagems and shifts:
King over All the Catlands, present and past
And future, that moustached
Artificer of fortunes, ****-in-Boots!
Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing
Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,
And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases--
Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part
A faery chamber hazily seen
And hazily figured--on dark afternoons
And windy nights was visiting of the best.
Then, too, the pelt of hoofs
Out in the roaring darkness told
Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm
Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit,
Between his hell-born Hounds.
And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear,
Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,
The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls
Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;
For, listening, I could help him play
His wonderful game,
In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners
Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near,
So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought
The run of Ali Baba's Cave
Just for the saying 'Open Sesame,'
With gold to measure, peck by peck,
In round, brown wooden stoups
You borrowed at the chandler's? . . . Or one time
Made you Aladdin's friend at school,
Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp
In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair
For all the embrowning scars in their white *******
Went labouring under some dread ordinance,
Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,
Strange Curs that cried as they,
Till there was never a Black ***** of all
Your consorting but might have gone
Spell-driven miserably for crimes
Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,
While you lay wondering and acold,
Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon
Queen Labe, abominable and dear,
Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,
Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw
Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk),
And muttered certain words you could not hear;
And there! a living stream,
The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags
And cresses, glittered and sang
Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness,
Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .

I was--how many a time!--
That Second Calendar, Son of a King,
On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined,
Pausing at one mysterious door,
To pry no closer, but content his soul
With his kind Forty.  Yet I could not rest
For idleness and ungovernable Fate.
And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame
(That wonder-working word!),
Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,
And soaring, soaring on
From air to air, came charging to the ground
Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,
And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawled
Flicked at me with his tail,
And left me blinded, miserable, distraught
(Even as I was in deed,
When doctors came, and odious things were done
On my poor tortured eyes
With lancets; or some evil acid stung
And wrung them like hot sand,
And desperately from room to room
Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),
To get to Bagdad how I might.  But there
I met with Merry Ladies.  O you three--
Safie, Amine, Zobeide--when my heart
Forgets you all shall be forgot!
And so we supped, we and the rest,
On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,
Almonds, pistachios, citrons.  And Haroun
Laughed out of his lordly beard
On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three
For all their Mossoul habits).  And outside
The Tigris, flowing swift
Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed
With broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;
The vast, blue night
Was murmurous with peris' plumes
And the leathern wings of genies; words of power
Were whispering; and old fishermen,
Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore
Dead loveliness:  or a prodigy in scales
Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold:
Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,
Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,
In durance under potent charactry
Graven by the seal of Solomon the King . . .

Then, as the Book was glassed
In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint,
Bewildering angles, so would Life
Flash light on light back on the Book; and both
Were changed.  Once in a house decayed
From better days, harbouring an errant show
(For all its stories of dry-rot
Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax,
Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),
I wandered; and no living soul
Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared
Upon them staring--staring.  Till at last,
Three sets of rafters from the streets,
I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,
With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,
Guarding the door:  and there, in a bedroom-set,
Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,
With an aspect of frills
And dimities and dishonoured privacy
That made you hanker and hesitate to look,
A Woman with her litter of Babes--all slain,
All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes
Staring--still staring; so that I turned and ran
As for my neck, but in the street
Took breath.  The same, it seemed,
And yet not all the same, I was to find,
As I went up!  For afterwards,
Whenas I went my round alone--
All day alone--in long, stern, silent streets,
Where I might stretch my hand and take
Whatever I would:  still there were Shapes of Stone,
Motionless, lifelike, frightening--for the Wrath
Had smitten them; but they watched,
This by her melons and figs, that by his rings
And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,
The Painted Eyes insufferable,
Now, of those grisly images; and I
Pursued my best-beloved quest,
Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.
So the night fell--with never a lamplighter;
And through the Palace of the King
I groped among the echoes, and I felt
That they were there,
Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,
Hall after hall . . . Till lo! from far
A Voice!  And in a little while
Two tapers burning!  And the Voice,
Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was--whose?
Whose but Zobeide's,
The lady of my heart, like me
A True Believer, and like me
An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! . . .

Or, sailing to the Isles
Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall
A black blotch in the sunset; and it grew
Swiftly . . . and grew.  Tearing their beards,
The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,
Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,
Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's hand,
And, turning broadside on,
As the most iron would, was haled and ******
Nearer, and nearer yet;
And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps
Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now
That swallowed sea and sky; and then,
Anchors and nails and bolts
Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,
A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides
Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,
A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal
About the waters; and her crew
Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left
To drown.  All the long night I swam;
But in the morning, O, the smiling coast
Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike,
Skirted with shelving sands!  And a great wave
Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive.
So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,
And, faring inland, in a desert place
I stumbled on an iron ring--
The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:
When, scenting a trap-door,
I dug, and dug; until my biggest blade
Stuck into wood.  And then,
The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,
Sunk in the naked rock!  The cool, clean vault,
So neat with niche on niche it might have been
Our beer-cellar but for the rows
Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars)
Full to the wide, squat throats
With gold-dust, but a-top
A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things
I knew for olives!  And far, O, far away,
The Princess of China languished!  Far away
Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief
Of Eunuchs and the privilege
Of going out at night
To play--unkenned, majestical, secure--
Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped
Like Tigris shore for shore!  Haply a Ghoul
Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,
A thighbone in his fist, and glared
At supper with a Lady:  she who took
Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.
Or you might stumble--there by the iron gates
Of the Pump Room--underneath the limes--
Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,
Just as the civil Genie laid him down.
Or those red-curtained panes,
Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily
Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,
Might turn a caravansery's, wherein
You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,
And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,
You'd not have given away
For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous
You had that dark and disleaved afternoon
Escaped on a roc's claw,
Disguised like Sindbad--but in Christmas beef!
And all the blissful while
The schoolboy satchel at your hip
Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze
Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn
From over Caspian:  yea, the Chief Jewellers
Of Tartary and the bazaars,
Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.--

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart
The magian East:  thus the child eyes
Spelled out the wizard message by the light
Of the sober, workaday hours
They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass
In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind
In ancient Severn's arm,
Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,
Whose floating populace of ships--
Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,
Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters--brought
To her very doorsteps and geraniums
The scents of the World's End; the calls
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride
Like fire on some high errand of the race;
The irresistible appeals
For comradeship that sound
Steadily from the irresistible sea.
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,
Telling itself anew
In terms of living, labouring life,
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear
Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,
The Angel-Playmate, raining down
His golden influences
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,
Walked with me arm in arm,
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.
Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,
Sends the same silver dews
Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies
On some poor collier-hamlet--(mound on mound
Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk
Sullenly smoking over a row
Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air
A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings
Of hurtling, tipping trams)--
As on the amorous nightingales
And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers
Of Samarcand--the Ineffable--whence you espy
The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears,
Like listed lightnings.
Samarcand!
That name of names!  That star-vaned belvedere
Builded against the Chambers of the South!
That outpost on the Infinite!
And behold!
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide
Might overtake you:  for one fringe,
One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one
Floats founded vague
In lubberlands delectable--isles of palm
And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,
The promise of wistful hills--
The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.

The unknown city
Enveloped in dark
So black even light would fear
She walks on barely visible
Standing still felt more frightening
She feels numb
She looks down and her legs missing
She see busses and cars
And trams and trains
Being driven by people and their eyes missing
There was sky but weather
There were trees but leaves
There were owls but feathers
There were bats all crying
She wanted to breathe and her nose missing
A strange sound plays somewhere around
Squeaks of abandoned seesaws and laughing clown
Playing an opera of horror
She wants to scream
Her voice choked
An immortal horror takes over
She hears a ring
A doorbell ring
She breaks her sleep
And realize it a dream
The bell kept ringing
She goes to the door
The door won't open
She looks at her bed
She is deep asleep
She shakes her up
She won't wake up
Tears roll on her cheeks her cry was missing
She wants to scream
Her voice was missing
She opens the door
The other side was missing
She turns around
She was missing
In the unknown city

The trailing ring of a trams bell
competes with a guitars strum,
soon the old GPO tolls in swell
while chatter of voices to hum.

Tables and chairs out at lunch
the parking here closed by six,
public holiday less of a crunch
echo of voices in phone sticks.

The hum of trams hover upon
child after a treat whines loud,
toward Autumn grey, roof wan
rain gathering to a wry shroud.

As trams echo carries on past
upon their patina a clatter too,
languages of street flying fast,
barista stirs his caffeine brew.

i'm constantly bemused, and rarely, amused, when reading heidegger... that's what i like about this genre above all other genres... sure, poetry is freeing, from the claustrophobic and sometimes overly "pedantic" plots, that borrow from some other stories and merely replica the originals... at least within the confines of poetry there's always an element of spontaneity, and there is no need to over-stretch something with periods of mundane mini-sub-plot drama... poetry is was crude oil is to refined petrol of a narrative... it's the raw material... philosophy on the other hand? well... it gives you the reaction materials, or rather: if philosophy is a reflective realm of narrative, a poet can read philosophy, and provide the reflexive narrative... with a snap of the fingers, he or she is already geared up, ready to spew a counter-narrative...
                       and that's the only truth you will ever, truly hear, from a heart that would rather cry at beauty of a byzantine chant, and give tears of joy to the beauty, as alms, rather than invoke the wrath of god, and give into using words while *******, as also praying... i can't remember whether i contaminated *** with words, i ****** like an animal... silently... sometimes i even refrained from expressing an "onomatopoeia" of gratification of broken syllables upon ******, i would sometimes eat it with silence... you allow words into ***? hail the formidable temple of satan... why require god (the word) in such acts, to later use the same medium to pray to god? why even bother praying? vain are the words of prayer, these mantras... god? is it really such an infantile / delusional hope? what was the prime motivation to continue life over the centuries... was it... a darwinism realization?

      a scientific fact moved people along? saturate people with enough science, show them their capabilities while hiding or mocking their flaws... and what sort of future is settled? no one needs to be right about everything in some i.q. caluclation to find a motivation, a will to live, to continue, or preserve... however snarky the new atheists or skeptics are... i say... well... god is over-imagined for personal gratification... i never came into this world: expecting what is before me, and past me... why should i expect whatever is behind the 9 month curtain in the confines of Our Mother's womb, Death's ***** (ah! at last, a non-gender neutral noun in the english language! death, in english, is, feminine! it's something welcoming, even if we depart unwanted, we arrive at... the point of being universally welcome, for all that live, die... as i once spoken with my grandfather on the balcony overlooking a graveyard: there... there is your democracy! there is you egaliterianism! no one is more equal, than they are equal, with a cross as shadow, lying in the hearth - we rise, we don't rise, it doesn't matter, if no great thing was ever accomplished by us, at least petty squabbles with neighbours do not bother us, anymore).

that's why i never understood why darwinism has dazzled so many people for so long, mind you, only in the anglophonic world... if you look elsewhere... darwinism is not a championed idea, as true as it might be, it's not elevated to an unshakeable dogmatism, differences are settled... but this anglophone "history" (current year) to no history jumping, between man and ape... and then even further to a big "bang" (can you, hear anything, in a vacuum? so why is it a big "bang"?!)
                                        it's a bit of a frenzy, jumping across so many histories... picking and chosing, cherry picking the best bits of the bible, or the quran, the same is with history, in these western lands, cherry picking... history is also subject to the same scrutiny at any of the holy books... again... heidegger... i am bewildered when reading him, circa 1938... when he writes about "the" Germans... by the looks of things, these "Germans", are not the Germans of heidegger's time... when i read about the aspirations of one philosopher, and put that against the current times... who were these people, who gave birth to the 21st century upon defeat in 1945? was it it also the ****** crisis smothering western berlin by allied forces right into the 1970s and early 1980s, children on ******?
                             wir, kinder von bahnhof ZOO -

                  who were these mythical Germans that heidegger is citing? of course, the pacified vierte ***** experiment, its ****** name for a currency, its even ******* currency aesthetic, of course there was going to be a pushback... after all, germanic peoples, goths, moved all the way past the Iberian peninsula and died off in northern africa... but... again... attention-seeking ***** that's England had to stage a politico-media frenzy, milking, milking, milking into their 3rd year running, after a while though... lethargy kicked in... but... there are still countries with their own currency... attention-seeking ***** still has her Lizzie on the FIAT... so... again... who are these mythical Germans of the early 20th century? these... standard bearers... they are to me as mythical as ancient Greeks or Romans... ashes in the sand... not by current standards would i place such hopes on their shoulders... such hopes would soon become too burdersome and they would not withstand the burden...
                   which is kinda of ironic... there was a prophesy... about the revival of the roman empire... it's not like i'm exactly religious... but it is being fulfilled... how the revival of the roman empire would ultimately fail... book of revelation... and, lo and behold! but you always hope... that people would not succumb to prophesy, by fulfilling it, rather, averting it... one thing is for sure though...
               das zweite heilig römisch *****...
has reemerged...
                         although... it's still not properly unearthed...
and... it shifted a little bit to the left... east...
        of **** me... its catholic claustrophobia **** show
over there... the way children are indoctrinated
in jesuit schools in the "alchemy" of catechesis?
           i would rather listen to a ******* adhan,
and that's as much honesty as you'll ever get...
                      i like visiting my grandparents...
                                   but...
          i much prefer the shitshow of England...
     i like grit... i like the grime...
                                                   the local *******...
i like the Irish, teasing me: oh but there are so many
neo-Nazis in Poland these days...
                  and then i wait for the same
       ******* mushrooms to pop up, in England!
oh they're always certain, the IRA...
                    see... it's a beautiful dream!
                       eh... less a united kingdom,
more... the anarchic kingdom...
                 since everyone is so so eager to grab
and pull... to burn the magic carpet from
under the ***** of Windsor...
                               still, heidegger, and those mythical
Germans! who were these people?!
i can't see them, not even one generation
later, hell, forget about two generations later,
who were these people?!
                     it's only been less than 100 years...
and i'm thinking about them like they're
       contemporaries of Pericles, for ****'s sake!

and now for the original draft:

.famous, those sardine-like-crammed trams of Cracow... you almost get the ultra-tourist experience of the trains heading to Auschwitz... mind you, poles are the most audacious commuters, making the packed trains of the London tube look like feng shui art-spaces... god almighty, even the english tourists screamed: thank god for the London transport service! i really was reliving being shipped off to a concentration camp... i tried to fiddle my hand into my trouser pocket to check the time on my phone... nope... started sweating like a porky on an enlarged hamster-wheel when in fact standing still... i'd call it a claustrophobic dying of a heart-attack type of commute from the airport into the centre of town.

there's nothing more abhorrent
than irish catholicism,
wait, there is: polish catholicism;
just overtly riddled by
freud's madonna-***** complex
in women...
   no wonder it's so hard to get
a hard-on around these women...
              and why ukranian /
bulgarian prostitutes give it to you
straight away...
                 nationalised catholicism
is just about as ugly as
individualised protestantism,
  notably in england...
      both are twice as bad at attempting
to be good.

- for a tomorrow of any "me":
i'm not a moral actor...
if i had the gratifying morality
that allows itself to clone...
yes... i would be a moral actor...
and beside moral acting
and sycophancy...
grand-standing before the mirror
details of whatever focuses itself
in a mirror and acts...
like ice but never the water...

but i can't be a moral actor...
if i'm already a mortal act...
for man to deviate into morality...
as some escape from
mortality... "it's only a 'missing' T"...
we can't escape mortality...
yet there are people who usurp
the reality of fatalism: mortality...
with a "reality" of moralism:
nihilism... the "reality" of a loss...
who would be the "wiser"...
the man who says:
do what you can in gravity of your days,
or...

what retains patterns of vogue...
ask the puritans!
what is moral one year...
is immoral the next...
and then they clash over escaping
the chains of taboo!
but for the "moral agent"...
there's only the "taboo" of mortality...

to have to die a moral man...
an antithesis of a nihilist...
to "escape" nihilism?
perhaps nietzsche wasn't pushed far enough...
i can't find an escape from fatalism...
not because i can't...
but because i don't "want" to...
otherwise: i only want what i can will...
and what i don't want...
is what lies beyond my capacity to will...
it's not a will toward "powerlessness"...
it's a will-within-itself...

but a moral man panics... when staging
an "argument" against the mortal man...
i'm not an moral man...
in that i am a mortal man...
a nihlism without death...
is... like... fatalism....
with enough cherry trees to take your
pickings to simulate a state
of solipsism... i.e.: you don't get in my way:
i don't get in your way.

Monday

Bleak unoriginal
Mondays

Where there is no
Whipped cream or cherries,
Hot chocolate sauce or
Peanut sprinkles

Only
***** wrecked trams
Absent faces &
Dreams of freedom
From hell

That is

This is

These are

The Monday Blues

Carrickfergus (1937) - poem by Louis Macneice.


I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams;
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn mill called it's funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.

I was the rectors son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long;

A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge
Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront;
Marching at ease and singing 'Who Killed **** Robin?'
The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.

The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England-
Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;
I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar
be always rationed and that never again

Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags
And my governess not make bandages from moss
And people not have maps above the fireplace
With flags on pins moving across and across-

Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,
Flares across the night,
Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,
A cage across their sight.

I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines
And the soldiers with their guns.




Louis Macneice

If the Scots
get independence
will we get better ****?

I'd vote for that.

Maybe the 'silent majority' are like ...

hospitals, schools, fish,
whisky, natural energy
blah blah

The good folk in Scotland
have been drip-fed the
worst **** in history:

coated in chemicals
bath rinsed
molasses
spare car tyre
plastic
flotsam

***
seriously

No wonder -
Bammed (right up)
Givin it
Havin it
Lovin it
is why
bands & DJs
Love to Play:
'up for it'

'Hey MoJo's
share some of
that MTV love'

anything that's called
Council Hash
and accepted as the norm
reeks of class politics;

ah they won't mind
the **** end o that
they're the Scots

The Scottish Government
should embrace
a new Scotland
and the people in it

We want lots of things:
one of which is
better ****.

Crime will drop:
- sniffing car tyres for a hit
- sales of Buckfast
will fund the entire
South East of England.

Scotland could lead the world
in upcycling as
Rizla fails to meet demand.

Our days would be so radically different;

auto flexi time
carbon neutral

trams with comfy seats
systematically
mathematically
go faster
than walking:
a mode of choice

I'd vote for that

...

public transport
***** in every way
the trains and the trams
run on a timetable of delay
the public using these **** facilities
should protest to the transport authorities
here's a draft you can use
off your butts fellas
or you'll be in the news
no mucking around
no stalling we'll take
extract the digit
for the traveling
public's sake

In memoriam Asher and Franklin

Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines
    willing their abandoned plows
    to perpetual dust and rain.

Burrowing into the Tioga hills
    with Keagle picks and sledges,
    they filled their trams with rough cut coal.

Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers
    of New England mills and trains
    and Pennsylvania's winter stoves.

Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks
    in tunnels deep beneath the hills
    and brushed away the clouds of soot.

Their coughs at first seemed harmless
    enough as from nagging colds or flus -
    but deepened as their lungs turned black.

Pain and choking drove them to their beds
    where no medic's art could aid them.
    Then the coroner came to seal their eyes.

A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity
    on an marble graveyard obelisk
    that pays no homage to their sacrifice.

September, 2007

The Great Falls,
was a massive
clone of ice;
yet still
her waters
poured forth
in roaring waves
over the ebb
of the river.

Sliding into
a frozen crevasse,
down an icy bar,
I land wet,
chilled and numb
from the duration
of the decent
and the soul
piercing cold.

On the landing,
the carcasses
of industrial waste
were encased
in a frozen loam.

The giant
mill wheel
locked in place,
entombed
in a glacier
of ice.

It made
good sense
to found
this city
on an
industrious
bluff.

The Great Falls
spun the wheels
that powered
vast manufactures.

Shoots
and trams
shot flumes
of water
down
every
street.

Everyman
was a master
of his
cottage industry,
forging bullets
constructing
locomotives,
spinning
the finest silk
from the
most exotic
foreign worms.

But the machines
shut down.

The handiwork
of learned men,
entrepreneurs,
urban planners,
engineers
and artisans
now encased
in frozen rust.

Barely a tool
could be used
to produce
a product
or plumb
a line.

A simple
hand tool
could not
be lifted
without
betraying
its purpose.

A society
of useful
manufactures
frozen shut;
dissolving
into bankrupt
liquidation;
so I left
my home
on Chianci Street
and caught the first
Paterson Plank coach
to the Hoboken Ferry.

I would be in
Manhattoes
by nightfall.

The morning travels
consumed thoughts
of future prospects.

The
silk mill
forever
closed.

The industry
of my home
city,
dead.

This weaver
of fine silk
had lost
his loom.

For William Carlos Williams
From: Vesuvia, 1997

Music Selection:
Yo-Yo Ma & Silk Road Ensemble,
Arabian Waltz

like a deer drinking from a stream
in the clearing
I am clearing
time away
I am the wolf
amongst women
I am a jar
half full
I am residue
on the sink edge
dusty, smudged
I watch people on trams
I watch people on buses
I don't smile
I watch the deer drinking
I play with my hair
I stare
I am the wolf
from afar
I am
I am waiting
for the clearing to wilt
and stream to dry up
I watch the deer
I am

The sea lies solid under ice,
The blizzard seldom stops;
The glögi's running freely
In friendly coffee-shops;
The trams still run and life goes on
And still I can't remember
Why no-one ever calls a song
"Helsinki in November".

Hanging by the post box red front door
Since 71
A long trench coat, shade of green
With flat cap on top, peak smudged
From fingers that had gripped
Pulled it from a head,
Both, an umbra of post war world gloom
To the boy, now the man who looks at it
Memories contained within its pockets and creases
Of boiled sweets handed to his bairns
Of neatly folded plastic bags,
For the necessary emergencies
He was so convinced he’d meet
Of hands that belonged to the coat,
Strong, firm that tousled this man’s hair,
Yet gentle and playful, full of fun
Of the head that wore the cap, the grin,
The mischievous glint, when his Peg wasn’t looking
As he slipped some coins into this boy’s tiny hand
Stories told, of times before the war,
Of stopping trams, driving pigs through N’castle
As a butcher’s Boy, on slaughter day
Of the day he met his Meg, down by the coast
Of showing off, and coming a cropper
And oh, how his Meg laughed
A coat holding so much of the past,
Of shipbuilding by the dark, ***** Tyne,
Boats that loomed over the houses
Taking this boy to see them launch
Dreaming of exotic, oriental places
He would never visit
Of betting slips, crumpled in pockets
From long gone nags, who caught his eye
Torn envelopes with Megs writing,
Bread - brown, tin of carnation milk (small)
Rich tea, sultanas, flour – plain
A use for his plastic bags,

it was the city we talked about in those long nights when we had nothing to say, lying in your bed and memorising the way the dark painted shadows across our cheekbones and jaws. melbourne, you would whisper.
a city far away and cultured and quaint and brimming with old buildings and trams and coffee houses and american things like seven-elevens and starbucks.
it was different being there with you. much more different being there without you.

Wings of the Wasp

Is it possible to change into a wasp and fly away into the world of dreams? Małgosia sometimes played with children in the courtyard, but on the swing in her garden she loved to follow the land of imagination. Dad displayed her films on the wall. The heroes of tales were her real friends. She found in books life on the other side…
Through the open window were flying intrusive insects. One of them fell into her ear. She woke up and wiped her eyes from astonishment. The room was swaying like a boat immersed in the sea. Pirate ships were swimming around. The girl looked at the picture hanging on the wall, it  changed into a red bird in a flash. She wanted to get up and go for a walk with the dog, but she felt that something strange is happening. Can that be that she slept in dad’s shaggy jumper? She looked in the mirror and remained speechless. She was all hairy and wings were sprouting from the back. Woven from dreams they were glittering similar to the cloth from which she sewed dresses for dolls. She touched them to feel if they are real. In a moment she lifted up, happy. She has always dreamt about flying. It is surely a dream. Mum’s scarf was fluttering from a wardrobe. Setter in dad’s riding boots entered the room.
-I won’t go to the park like an ordinary dog. I want to know Your world. Maybe we will go the amusement park?-she said with an Irish accent.
The girl couldn’t take a breath. Her pet, beloved cuddly toy spoke with a human voice.
-Altunia! Come here, I’ll comb You.
-Talk to me Alti, that’s how I have written in the family tree. I’m an aristocrat. You can make me an exquisite breakfast, this time I’ll eat bacon and eggs with You at the table and don’t pet me without my permission.
-I’m glad that I can talk with You. I’ve always wanted to know what You feel.
I think that You don’t understand dogs. We’re the most sensitive creatures in the world. You can talk with me, because You’ve changed into a wasp in a wonderful way…
She looked in the mirror and she couldn’t believe. She was an insect. She had antennae, bug eyes and abdomen.
She looked out of the window. Trams were flying at the city like dragonflies. Computers and smartphones conquered the streets. Police dogs were directing traffic. The world was light and colourful like painted with multi-coloured pencils. From huge hands growing from the earth like trees doors were opening, birds were flying from them. Suddenly she heard a strange patter. To her astonishment she saw the most incredible species of dinosaurs which she lately saw in the children coloring book. They were eating leaves from the trees and were talking with people about the construction of a new world. Lego bricks came to life, old ages started to mingle with the present time. Knights on dragons were entering the house, pirates ships were built with the high-speed hovercrafts. Małgosia moved her wings and suddenly she found herself in the familiar place. But it wasn’t similar to her kind-hearted kindergarten. It was rebuilt into a space ship. The most incredible creatures lived there.People-Insects and doggy cats were teaching children alphabet and pronunciation, flowers were quarreling in English about the place in the main alley, lamps were perfecting image showing in the best light. She lifted up over the earth. She could fly higher than eagles and planes. She watched a new world from the bird’s eye view: auto-dragonflies, glidery birds and parroty drones.
Suddenly the storm broke. The lightings changed children room into a huge eye of the cyclone. Red, golden, orange birds circled over the house. They flew from the lost planet of eternal happiness.
Wasps in suits were singing the music of Michael from The Jackson Five. They were playing football with Tsubasa. The world was suspended in the colours of the rainbow. The rain of sweets fell into the earth. Irysy and krówki conquered the milky way. Televisions jibber-jabbered at the table, computers advertised “Prince Polo” around. You could see in them how the world would be in a thousand years time and how it was before Christ.
The world was light as a soap bubble. It was flying higher and higher.
-If You’ll be dilligent and You’ll read a lot of books You’ ll meet a nice surprise.
-What ? I can’t wait!
- I’ll take You to a place which once exists and once doesn’t exist.
She jumped with joy. She moved her wings and flew away with her setter to a mysterious land where the river of caramel flowed, houses, schools and kindergartens were built from wafers and gingerbreads and icicles of Italian ice-cream were hanging down from the roofs.
-Look out! If you taste these sweets the land will melt away.
-They look so delicious, that I can’t hold back.
-In grown up life you’ll have to deny yourself not once.
Ms. Pear went in hand with Mr. Apple to the garden over which hanged the cloud of whipped cream. In this land everyone was long-living. They didn’t know troubles and suffering. The King Honey First ruled there, taught his minions goodness, tolerance and wisdom.
-O! If only on Earth it was so beautiful…
-It is only so in the fairy tales.
-You said that imagination has a great power.
-In the world where you are everything is possible. Look only in the mirror.
She looked in the grandmother’s mirror. She saw a train going into the past, inside chairs seemed to look at her with little gray eyes, oranges were dancing like oriental dancers, still life was coming down from the old pictures and as a living wandered in the corridor of the rushing vehicle. Birds settled down in the antique clock, the dog wagged his tail at them, books told forgotten stories. Two frogs jumped to the room croacking that they’re princesses from the green kingdom.
The room went green taking the form of a shaking jelly. You could jump on it like on the trampoline with the ever growing group of royal frogs, walk through the walls and closed doors. It was infinitely incredible.
-Great…I can walk through the walls, I don’t need windows and doors.
-The world belongs to you princess!
Everything is so soft like a chewing gum, objects extend.
-If You want, you can take something to your hand and form something new, only use imagination.
The girl took a piece of picture and formed a flower, she didn’t like it, so she changed it into a bird. In a flash she taught him how to fly using a sign language. Perfect play, better than old origami!
-And now I’ll show You a trick possible only in the Land of Wasps.
They sat in the children bed which at once started to fly.
-We’ll fly into the future.
They got in and glided twenty years ahead. The girl saw herself with the children at the blackboard. She was teaching English preschoolers. She had home and a happy family. She was writing tales about her experiences from childhood.
Suddenly time twirled. The house lifted up and started to rush nowhere.
-In the Land of Wasps every sorrow can be changed into a joy.
-And now I’ll show you a trick possible only in the Land of Wasps.
-I think that this book is wiser more than one sage.
-From now You will always be happy.


Flowery People

Małgosia suddenly found herself in the flowery world cracking from the excess of colours, shapes, voices, thoughts and prejudices. She tasted life with all senses like a well-baked mum’s cake. She was listening more and more to the huge ear of the flowery world. Something started to rattle. Blurred memories, whispers and voices were coming from inside, flooded with light, saturated with colours.
Faces were moving and restless. She was running losing herself, opening pages of the new events, but everything became for her blurry, reality seemed to be inaccessible. She had to pretend that she understands the world of talking birds and insects, but it was too much for her. She walked slowly in the crowd and in the dazzling brightness of the cars, like a little lonely ant and she didn’t feel the part of the surrounding reality. She prefered to look and taste the beauty of the drop of a dew, changing move of face, mimicry, to listen to the whirr of existence.
Flowery People and Insect-People were in great friendship. In this land the sun was always shinning, no one was sad and didn’t know what evil was. Flowery creatures have never been ill, they lived long and happily. The world was an eternal play of imagination.
-O, if only Earth was such a beautiful, paradise garden.
-Suffering is needed.
-Why?
- For people to appreciate more its absence.
Flowery world had one weakness. It existed only when it was dry and hot. With the rain of tears the garden melted and disappeared.
-As you can see goodness and health are fragile.
-What can we do to save them?
-Do good, respect health.


Pigeonholed

Drawery People full of thoughts and memories were the separated world. There were the corners of existence going to infinity. This interior, the richness of colours, shapes and voices made Małgosia into astonishment. She stood close to the coral time which resembled foamed sea hiding its mysteries. She wanted to get inside, but it was inaccessible for her. Drawery people were still searching the stairs leading to the interior. In their kingdom everything was blurring, losing shapes and names. Life played with death, it was music and her echo.
They walked with difficulty, jamed, hiding fears, they were like unwritten pages of the books. Closed they came to life, when someone opened the drawer. Cities were built inside where kings and ordinary people lived. You only had to look inside and small kingdoms, empires and civilizations arised. Pages of the exercise-book were changing into planes and pencils into ballet dancers.
-Don’t touch them, because they’re so fragile that they will break in a moment. Like corals strung on a thread. That’s life of the pigeonholed people.
-I’d like to talk with them.
-Before You have to learn their language.
-The whole world separates us.
-Look out when you clean the desk, pencil case and school accessories, you can hurt its being. Every object has a soul, you have to only learn to see and hear them, not only think about yourself. Pens changed suddenly into the army of soldiers, they started to fight with the sharpeners. She found a sentence on the desk: “fulfill your dreams”. In every drawer a new dream was waiting and a new world to discover, you had to only find the key and the door to the most magnificient tale was opening. In the first drawer she saw little people, everything was diminished there. You had to tiptoe not to afraid creatures little and helpless like children. In the second drawer there was the world of giants, in the next lived animals speaking with a human voice, in the another there were pencils changed into wizards, flying trams, glidery birds. She opened the old, creaky door.
She went to the wardrobe. She took her favourite clothes. It appeared that they could move her into the different time. Somehow she has never liked to wear dresses and tights, but she saw that after wearing them she could travel to another planet and know it inhabitants. In a new world everything was possible. It was sufficient to have a dream and furry wings took her wherever she wanted. She had to find suitable key for the magical desk. It happened that this key was learning a new word. The girl started to read more tales, dictionaries and belles-lettres because she wanted her dreams to come true.
Thanks to the wings she visited all the countries of the world. She was moving in time, she learned history, geography and literature. She discovered how big is the power of thought and imagination. She lived in the land of pure white, everything was fleeting here, it lasted only a moment and then it stopped to be. She traveled there where instead of people walked clocks in hats, they were driving cars, building new civilizations. In this place time was flowing too fast, she couldn’t keep up with him.
-I want to save him. Be always a happy child. Just like in my dreams. Why it can’t be like that?
-If you were a child, you would be really unhappy. Dreams are beautiful only for a moment, then comes reality which can be beautiful too. You only have to use imagination, change bad moments into a joy-said Irish lady.
Suddenly strong wind started to blow. It turned over the pages. In one moment the letters woke up from a dream and started to walk in the city. Some of them wanted to be free and changed into birds. It was strange to meet wandering letters in the street. Suddenly the whole world was filled with the alphabet from the tales.
-People think that they know our world, but it hides many mysteries. In every letter there is a treasure more precious than gold. Who will discover hidden meanings, will be the happiest sage-said the setter.
-Why people don’t read tales and stories, they prefer to close in the circle of computers and televisions?-asked the girl.
-It’s easier. Life written in books is more rich, but more difficult to learn.
-It’s a pity that I’m not a dog, then everything would be much easier.
-O princess, believe me, our world is more complicated than you think. Be happy that you have a loving family and a dog, the most faithful friend.
-Take me to the other land that I would tell children and grandchildren.
-Bow-wow-barked the dog and together they soared.
She landed in the country where ruled the colour blue, yellow and red. When she woke up she was in the place of eternal happiness. Adults didn’t have to go to work and children get up to school. Duties were changed into pleasure. This world was infinite, it was swimming like a river, it was swaying like a pendulum of a clock. It resembled cat’s cradle. Lakes were looking at people like the faithful river. You could see your soul in them like in the mirror.
-What is happiness?
-It’s different for everyone.
-Dogs are happy when they have treats and comfortable bedding.
-Probably we are the most happy when man likes back our fidelity and devotion.
Suddenly the drawers and wardrobes extended like telescopes, they started to look at me and smile. I was sure that they hide the stories of the past years. I learned that dresser was once a princess and coffee table the knight in the Romanian chariot.
Drawery cities were flooded by the tea with lemon.
-I have to save it and clean up.
-You can do it like in life, there is always a way.
Drawery city closed and started to dream for the next years.
-Maybe it will wake up when it grows up.



On the Other side of the Mirror

Gosia remembers how she didn’t want to get out from the house of dolls and children bathtub. She imagined that she hides time to the pocket and changes its course. She was coming back to a little girl listening to her world. Every moment was filled with longing for childhood. Life was closing in the room of play. She felt like a spider tangling the net with the thread of imagination. She created new kingdoms on the pieces of paper, she rambled to the past.
She folded life in the drawers like mother clothes. Time stopped to flow then. Every word, look was a story. Moments resembled the river of her childhood where she felt safe and peaceful, she could be whatever she wanted in spite of the world. She floundered in the water like a heron, she was touching the sand soft like a dream, she was paddling, the water was still, clean like her reflection in the mirror, fear and anxieties disappeared, everything was possible, she imitated the flight of birds, she felt one of them, free and comfortable with herself. The border between childhood and adulthood didn’t exist. She could dream, she didn’t hear the voices of the street, cars rushing nowhere, there was only she and the river. She was looking with joy at the hut from the children adventures. It was built with leaves and letters of memories. She laid on the back and turned her face toward the sun. She was approaching to the footbridge taking her away from adulthood. Green waves entwined her body and soul. She wanted to spread her wings and fly away.
Mom, Dad and dog, it was all her world which provided peace. Time was playing with her, it was looking at her with a pinch of salt when she was changing into a bird, stone, river swimming to the desired goal.
Life seen through the mirror has broken to pieces.
Grown up Małgosia cleaned her room of play. She closed the drawers of the desk.
She got dressed and combed her hair on her own. She didn’t need the Land of Wasps any more…

chopper: chop-off-chew; a 502 bad gateway bypass cheat code...

i know what i'll spend my money earned on, in what priority, i'll spend them on a brothel, i'll spend them on a *******: after all... she will spend that earned money on trivial matters, she will buy a pair of shoes: i'll buy a pair of shoes when the ones i'm wearing will become worn... i hope i can write this without an inkling toward spite... i'm happy to be childless, i'm happy to not be married... how best to decipher my feeling, at present... FAUN... WAINAMOINEN... i will not trust the leftist cosmopolitan brigade to break up this... resurgence of a folkish spirit among the Hyperboreans... making a resurgence in song, in wording... covert... under the radar... seemingly sleeping... even Heidegger mentions this... of the people is very much distinct to: of the folk... people inhabit cities and the make-shift constructs of nations... the folk? they inhabit the land! why should an African feel welcome among the winters and the crows... when i... giggle like a child... foreign among the lost seasons at the equator with the macaque monkeys?! these people are not here to belong... they know it themselves... however many safety-nets are placed for our liberal liking & their comfort... they are unnaturally "here"... our own worst enemies... white "liberal elites"... one cocktail after a second... after... no more water to churn out alcohol... these people have come for a reason... i don't know what the reason is... better living is hardly requesting more complications from technology... when life can be simplified from the closest of the most close connections... hier: hoch norden?! alle er tabt! tysk er æsten dansk...
deutsch ist fast dänisch! we might have fought wars among each other... but at least we belonged, together, even i... liberal as i were, for so long... it's not like i can't be... leaving a route for allowance for other cultures, other races... but... i'm... becoming more... detached from reality... detached from purpose... from the geography... from the forest... language is my last defence... these people shouldn't be here because they shouldn't be here: they shouldn't be here because... there's no need for me to be among their culture! their people! if i don't need to be somewhere, why should someone "think" it necessary to be among "my", people? mongrel ******* mongrel gives us this... ****** culture! hardly any tourism... i can be a tourist in Africa... would i want to live in Africa? no! so... why the ****... thank you Russia... WE, HAVE, NO, SHARED, STORIES... JUST... THESE... SOCIAL-JUSTICE ARGUMENTATIVE POINTS... EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL: HARDLY NARRATIVE... SUFFERING FROM MEMORY EROSION... IN THE IMMEDIACY OF JOURNALISTIC *******... i bemoan this sudden quest of man: because... i believe in its failure... a failure most gross... my heart prays for this ****** experiment to fail! fail it must! scheitern es muss! svigte det skal! lethargy kicks in... being too pleasing... too pleasant... my mind retorts: almost automatically... i'm QUITS! why? looking at children... i don't want them to suffer this mental diarrhoea in future years... i want them to look at faces most familiar... i'm SLEPT... i'm QUITS... ******* SAVVY?!

i've been a hermit for so long,
shunning human contact with only minor
outbursts of contact with strangers,
old men on park benches
talking about their grandchildren
and sons-in-law,
Rayleigh bicycles, seasonal diets
(not buying watery strawberries from
Spain in the winter months,
eating more vegetables - in general -
binging on local, seasonal fruit
from local farms),
prostitutes in the brothel, talking...
*******...
but always in concentrated outbursts
of interaction...
someone in London around Whitechapel
stopping me while he implored me
to fix his breaks...
hands up... listen: if i had some tools...
i'd try...
this spurned me on to now ride around
with some tools... i only need about three...
obviously i'm not going to take a *******
pump with me too... there's a reasonable
point of what i am willing to do for strangers...
so i gave him some advice...
it's the back break, that's faulty?
remember... take longer to break...
since the front break is only working you
might go forward by breaking too heavily...
and if you're going to break heavily...
stand up on your breaks...
and leverage yourself on the handlebars...
put extra pressure on them: top down...
homeless men...
once i ******* this woman for sitting
down on the pavement with this homeless man
i knew who migrated from Romford
to Seven Kings...
gave him a cigarette and laughed a while...
with some fwends... some autistic guy from
school who... got into drinking...
blah blah...
     so she starts attacking me with...
YOU! YOU! i just waved my hand and told her:
i'm not going to argue with you...
i suppose she was implying i was supposed
to be talking up women...
i was there for a Guinness...
later that same night i went to the brothel
for some love... or as i like to call it:
cuddle & giggles...
- that one time this crazy Rastafarian started
talking to me about the Hebrew deity
deformity (in his Rastafarian way)
we started talking from Romford
he dragged me to... Hackney... of all places
to distribute pamphlets to black Baptist churches
i had a "date" with a few fwends to watch
some boxing on t.v.,
- i won't even mention that one black guy
who took me on a carousel of his crack *******
addiction... that was a long time ago...
the two of us were strapped to the insides of
a phone-box while he took up a crack-*******
glass doo-di (what would you call it?
a glass smoking pipe?)
******* madman... that's also at the same time
i was having my first psychotic breakdown
from... smoking marijuana and fasting...
and walking around London...
so many more isolated instances of "dealing"...
interacting with... people...
now this... from my period of isolation...
social hibernation... where i threw myself at writing
so heavily hearted...
graveyards, forests... at night...
there was this one funny instance...
a car parked in Bower Wood...
took a while to take a **** on the grass...
owl... check... fox... check... rabbits... check...
deer... check... something cracked some
branches while i sat on a log bare-chested...
i actually opened my mouth and uttered
the words: that's not a human... is it, are you?!
walking almost blind screaming at the top
of my voice, growling... snarling...
through havering county park... climbing past
a barbwire fence to get up close to
the horses grazing in the field...
in the dark putting my hand against a horse's mouth...
i can forgive the horse...
it thought i might have something in my hand...
like a sugar cube or an apple to nibble on...
it started nibbling on my fingers...
bucktooth ****** turned around and his hoof
almost skimmed my forehead...
i still wonder what it might feel like
to be kicked in the head by a horse's hind legs...
i tried it once... punched myself several times
in the face until i gave myself a black eye...
i still have marks on my knuckles from the time
i took pleasure from putting out
cigarettes on them...
i guess i don't dream much...
i need to be closest to reality through...
the only best available a medium that most
resonates: pain...
- or perhaps a quote from Pablo Coelho...
the alchemist...
as a teenager i was planning on travelling to India...
India came to London,
****'s sake... the whole world came to London!
why would i leave (Greater) London?
if i were to travel across the Thames...
i'd be in a completely different country...
i once cycled from Romford to Greenwich...
already the difference were visible...
the north is like... what's the right comparison?
BUDA...
the south of London? PESHT...
less underground, more trains...
trams of Croydon, for ****'s sake: i thought that
trams were a Berlin / Warsaw "thing"...
if i wanted to: i'd ******* to Edinburgh and...
find the old place i was staying at
in my third year... Montague St.
just off Nicholson St.,
i'd go back to the mosque near Appleton Tower
for a curry... i'd perhaps do some bouldering
on the Crags... if i were to find my mountain
climbing shoes...
i am still, yet, to eat a deep-fried Mars bar...
or a deep-fried pizza...
like **** i am ever going to...
just today i ate a revelation...
usually... smoked salmon... well... obviously
on a bagel... with some fresh cucumber and dill
with a decent dollop of mayo...
today?
soft white cheese... the smoked salmon
& some lemon juice...
wow...
- finding work outside the family business...
i.e. not working with my father has become...
refreshing...
he... he could "abuse" me verbally as best he could...
you're doing this wrong, you're doing
that wrong... strangers? no chance...
but this own son: he treated the harshest...
i said to myself: **** it... i'm not putting up with
this sort of UBERSCHEISSE!
i haven't worked in... has it been a decade?
"worked" worked... i wrote... investing in
people not yet born!
the people, my contemporaries: sure, i care...
but... i'm not writing a Dan Brown novel:
am i? i'm looking for... longevity...
i'm looking for immortality...
to hell with not being paid...
to hell with spending money in ways that makes
you regret it: you will never find yourself
earning money: but you will regret... spending it
in ways that deviate from a "pattern" of
well-kept endeavours...
i don't mind spending anything on my bicycle...
why? cycling is my last outlet
of... aloneness "tourism"... to hell with going
on a cruise... i take up cycling to...
Thurrock... or deeper into Essex...
hell... i'll cycle into central London...
ah... sigh of relief... i'm alone...
i like dodging traffic... i like the added thrill of large
objects that might **** me...
but at the same time i adore the abundant emptiness
of the countryside...
well... it's not: "empty"... but writing makes it out
as it is... no ******* Wordsworth's worth
of ode to nature here...
perhaps some... die grenzwacht hielt im osten...
folk songs in, esp. in die deutschezunge...
- i think i know why, why i find this language
so endearing... it's all about the infiltration process...
i could... wholeheartedly... abandon it...
with even having to wear shoes...
i feel so much for it: yet at the same time...
if i were recalled to the mutterzungen needs...
i think i might... how i can hold twin-allegiances
i will never know...

uns ander'n brach die kraft...
und heute noch und immer
    den weg nach osten zeigt...

so far away from people... yet so close...
to put into writing...
i would have loved joining the army...
chemical engineer? ZYKLON B...
rings a bell...
now... reengaging with people...
on a minor scale of what an army cohort
looks like...
i still feel ****** getting a chemistry
degree: not leaving school at 15 and joining the army...
then again... i really don't know what
i'd do with too much money:
you can always have too much money:
even if you earn... £15,000 a year...
i remember my student years back
in 2004 circa 2007 (circa, ergo, no hyphen +/-1
a year in the "bracket")
beside the student fee...
£3000 could easily cover the rent,
the food... the odd spontaneous going to
the cinema... the gym fee...
well, fair enough... as students... we weren't paying
council tax... but £3000 could cover a lot of things...
if we're talking earning... £15000...
and you take a Paulo Coelho approach
akin to: there's nothing to ******* find when
you get to the Giza pyramids... when you *******
to Brazil... you seen the world doesn't actually mean:
a local crack-head took you on
one of his ******* shimmy run...

i don't belong no more in Kenya than
a Kenyan belongs among the Hyperboreans...
sure... if he feels suicidal...
and abhors his people so much...
but look where Brexit left us...
all the Polacks suddenly didn't feel welcome...
not part of the multicultural project
of the implosive Empire as they might have
felt...
what English soldier ever fought
on the lands of Poland during the second world
war... yet... how many ****** pilots
fought for Britain?!
huh?! huh?!
history implies: people keep on forgetting...
the labour of love for us that love
to remember... like...
the world offers us rubrics borrowed from
school...
i don't mind an African trying to live
in Europe... but **** me:
you won't find me living in Africa
any time soon!
sure... the macaques are cute...
to hell with the heat!
no time soon!
i, need, seasons!
i need, eating, bland!
what, rosemary & rhyme not good enough,
for you, ******?!

smoked salmon managed to bench press
my liking for raw herring...
miss the raw cucumber, the dill, the mayo...
add some soft white cheese...
some lemon juice... keep the bagel...
now we have ourselves a sport!

the Polacks have left the shores...
hello tourists... your anti-racist rhetoric has
paid off!
i'm hardly native...
weren't your own natives...
your own fathers supposed
to bemoan the fate of your own daughters?!
you don't...
and... i'm... somehow... supposed to?
i'm much more invested in the men...
i need... rigidity... structure...
women always tend to **** it up: anyways...
some... amnesia principle...

FAUN:  WAINAMOINEN...
unplugged... "v"...
  NIRVANA's unplugged sessions...
choke... shotgun shot to the head..
Christine Chubbuck vs. the Court of Courting Blind...
rich Russian girls taking  picture of the pitch...
i'm standing in the middle...
i guess there's also me involved...

- from my hermit phase... being engaged with so many
people... esp. the children... oh god... i love the children...
for someone who enjoyed their absence from
society...
to be so, greedily... reengaged.... like a snap....
almost weird...
but... almost like: I: WANT: IT!
sure... i'm but a pawn in this role...
but... here's my excuse... i'm also anders-wo...
here's my antithesis of da-sein...
anders-wo...          am-ich?!

tid: til begynde! ja: nu! kvik!
tabt en time
tabt løs "næsten" alt...

         fanden du:                     ord så blød

KURWA MAĆ!

The well is dry
Tonight

Not much thought

Nowhere to go
But sleep

Or

Drink

The well is dry
Tonight and

I envision black crocodiles
With razors for
Teeth, chuckling underneath
Their putrid, blood stink breath
Their belly's tanning
In the sun like I wish I could

Pepper shakers for
Limbs caring for
The war sick wounded
Sounding like the whoosh
Of the first windy roar
From an atomic explosion

Naked and writhing and waiting
For death to crack his knuckles
The big sleep at last
Where no light can be seen
Taking comfort in the new, familiar darkness

At night, when there isn't much going on,
I see the water start to boil over
The food begin to rot in its bowls
Lakes churn from no wind or rain or boat
Only spinning to feel its means has an end

Here, the fish weep into their scaly fins
And night - when there isn't much going on -
With the bars all open and the churches all closed
And the streets bursting with de-salienation tools
Branded with love and hate and indecency;
Where matters pressed are things worth dying for

The well
Is dry
Tonight

And the trains and trams pass by
A ***** dies
A cop makes a young woman cry

Yes,
There is not much
Going on

Tonight

But there are still things happening
I try to hear them
I get lucky every now and again

When there isn't much going on,

The dust of the dirt
Fills my nostrils, making it
Hard to breathe and I see
Snakes have bitten my feet,
Though they do not swell and
Laughter of one who once loved me,
Has turned to the ringing in my ears

Clouds form the forward march
And the fortress has buckled down
This place does not need to make sense
Here, I can be alone with no one but
Who I was before and who I wish to be

The well is dry tonight
But, I continue seeking

I keep on
Digging
Picking
Brushing away the dust
And wiping away the blood

The well is dry tonight
And I try to keep on

Drinking
Thinking
Blinking

Anyways

Doubtful of the future
As our wooden furniture
Creaks and cracks
Like wounded soldiers sutures

House on the edge of the water
The Earth shows to
Only be getting hotter
Heaven may only be a starter

I've asked all my questions
Meandering in drunken perspiration
The moon hangs laughing
Behind my back
Where I was before this
I can't keep track

Trams, metros, terror colored in streetlights
All souls around me barely giving off light
Piano man plays with broken fingernails
Screaming he's guiltier than all that is wrong or right

Could have beens
Would have beens
Should have beens
Sticky black tar regret

Stare at the sun and
Unveil the lie they've
Been telling you all along

I wrote something
That looked like something
That came before
I wrote that other something

And when I read that something
And read the other something
Both seemed to be about
Nothing and nothing
As well as
All of the above

Staring at the stove top
She lays upstairs in bed
Silence atop these fingertips
Secrets flying high
In this unstrung kite

A cloud stubs his toe
The sun makes His move
I feel like a real man
Acting like I have a plan

Too fast some days
Other days
Too slow

Proving routine
Is the curse of the
Owner's of the silver spoon

I hang on the edge of
A smooth, round beer bottle

My hardened fingertips
Show to be slipping

I'm lost in a sea of forgiveness
Frantically keeping my head afloat
While smiling to myself that I left
The life vests tied upon the boat

My need for revenge has
Sunk into The Black Sea
Bitterness was such a boring feeling
Like an old ring I was always wearing

I hand out my pleases
Like ripped off store candies
Everybody's got their maybes ready
I look at my hand and see its steady

This day
This month
This year or so away
From home is
Showing me

Only I

Know where I need to go

Let the snow fall
The government post what they will
High up where we can't reach on the wall
All will be remembered
All will be forgiven one day

The last man to laugh
Will be
He who believes not

In His own trap

IF ONLY THE WAR WOULD DIE

If only the War would
die

but it lives on
crawls across the mind

the everyday things
infected

people in trams and buses
wearing my dead friend's face

until everyone
becomes him.

A car backfires
and I hit the ground

to the amazement and amusement
of passersby who pass by.

It's what kept me
alive.

This the curse
of survival.

Even birds wear
my dead friend's face.

Even his face
in a flower's petals.

He falls in the rain
again and again and again

stranded on the wire
like a ****** broken puppet

the wind
pulling his strings

dying for days
on end.

"Die you ****** ******...die!"
I beg him.

But he refuses
to listen.

Three men dead
by ****** fire

trying to get him
me I got it in the leg.

I see him rot
stage by stage

the secrets of the grave
open for all to see.

I see the rats
gnawing at his dear face

until only his skeleton
grins at me.  

His voice forever
calling to me.

Entered in the place
Sometime around
No time

My voice had gone
And there was a leak of
Green mold in the wall
And across the hall
I could hear the screams of
Either passion or
Real pain

Outside the trams
Roared past &
The way they whined
Sounded like a young dog
Screaming or a little
Girl whining -

The sound
Woke me up
For the first
Month.

But the Autumn smell
Warm with eggs, beer & pasta sauce
Started to fill up the place
And slowly it all
Started to feel
Like the temporary home
It was meant to be

And when your supposed
To settle down in
One place you see that
You were never meant to
Be that kind of person because
It drives you mad seeing
The same four walls everyday
In and out down the chute made
Of concrete, electricity & will power

How do people do it
For so long
Without going insane?

I don't know

I hope to never know

Or maybe I already have,
And I don't know it...

Perhaps
I'm already
On the other side
Of that

Crazy River.

Soon
The place started to
Fill up with things
That looked the same
As what was in my brain;
Things that kept me alive
And kept me awake and
Steadied my brain from
Tilting to far to the right or
The left or front to back

Then the windows
Started opening
Cool fresh air coming in
Like a rushing stream
From a place I knew as
"Nowhere"

Drunks outside
Passing in the night
Me one them
Some of the time &
Me - an observer -
The other times

But

As I watched I saw
Little bits of me in them
More and more and
I started to re-evaluate what
Kind of night stalker
I wanted to be

These walkers - some at least -
Can't crane to see the stars
Or hear the way the tram passes by them
Much like
The young ladies in the tight
Jeans with their heels clicking and
Their lips licking just so
Gentle & evil like they always
Seem to do

I was at
A loss of everything
As I watched myself
Wander to the next
Hole that would
Never be my or
Their last.

At quite a loss.

Losing is winning
And winning is losing
When you go right
You also go left

There is no escaping
This mad
Crippling
Self-obsessed readers digest
Crazed, murderous, treacherous &
*** blistering place

We are here standing
On the brink of
Digital beauty,
Sharing all and being all
And seeing pictures
That people in the past
Would never get to see or imagine
Simply because of this
****** little machine in front of me.

The trade off

From one generation

To

The next.

It is the twisted teal torrents of water
That gush through its heart.
It is the paint on the walls
And the Ancient museums full of art.
It’s the beauty of the city center
The shops and the boutiques.
It’s the bells of the green trams,
Winding down the cobblestone streets.
It’s the wind on my back
And the sun on my face
It’s the way when I go out,
Hours are lost without a trace
It’s the people floating down the river
In the heat of the year.
It’s my feeling of security,
Because here there’s nothing to fear.
It’s all the unique traditions,
Passed down from generations.
It’s the faces of the people,
One from every nation.
It’s the feeling I get
When I just walk around.
When I take in what’s around me
The sights and the sounds.
It’s the knowledge that
In this city I have grown.
It’s all the things I’ve learned,
That I may never have known.
It’s when I sit still in my room,
And know that there’s so much left to explore.
It’s the opportunities I have
To do things I’ve never done before.
It’s the archaic beige bridge
That stands down town.
It’s that path we like to walk,
Or that cute cafe we found.
It’s those beautiful books I bought,
The ones I know I’ll never read.
It’s the happiness that comes
With the quiet life I lead.
It’s how much more there is to discover,
So much beauty I’ve yet to see.
It’s that feeling of contentment
When you know you’re where you’re meant to be
The more I learn about this city,
The more my heart desires to stay
And know I may be wrong,
But I think this could be home someday.

I heart Blackpool, engraved tankards
Little old men & full kit wankers.
Bracing wind with rain & sleet
******* blowing in the street.
In Blackpool.

Kiss me quick & squeeze me slow.
Madame Tussauds, pier-end show
Grubby track-suits, baseball caps
Homeless people search for scraps.
In Blackpool.

Sun and rain, blue & grey.
All four seasons in one day.
Drug ravaged transients dressed in rags.
Haggard old women smoke their ****.
In Blackpool.

Flashing lights & lots of noise
Flirty girls & drunken boys
Abba tributes, yesterday’s stars,
Rattling trams & clapped out cars.
In Blackpool.

Penny arcades & bingo halls.
Amusement rides & market stalls.
Drag Queens flaunt with macho men.
Stripper seduces drunken hen.
In Blackpool.

Rooms by the hour, rooms by the night.
A £1 burger & a £2 pint
Rolling sea & golden sand.
Lowest life expectancy in the land.
In Blackpool.

I woke early
this morning in Lisbon
before the birds chirped
the traffic shattered
the silent room in the
Sao Bento Guesthouse
and the old tram
struggled, groaned up
the steep hill

She stirred beside me
even and measured breaths
I turned on the white light
and read Pessoa
and Florbella Espanca
poets of the past
of the hilled city
split poetic personalities
the one
she, the other,
a killer of
her self

"Abre os elhos e encara a vida!"
advice not taken

today we'll walk those hills
ride those trams
and eat seafood along the Tagus
as we ignore
the passing
of our lives

open your eyes and face your life

The sky was filled with the echoing wheeze
Of all the protesters with everything they believe
Oh' there are the sirens and the barks of many man
What they fight for is reform for a new land

Can you hear the way the pigeons fly?
Imagine to yourself and try not to lie
There are the dancer's and the political magistrates
All wondering to themselves who the King will make

Lady imagination atop Parnassus's mountain
I see you there alone & naked in that fountain
I charge you with bringing me to this heavenly place
Making me see there is only you to believe as true

The hasty hare clicks his pocket watch as he walks
As Alice steps forward, how sad she cannot stop
And all the doomed and determined minds
Frown for they see their fear is much like mine

Here the castle stones whisper as peace spells disaster
All the trams carry the drunken lined as if in rafters
My sister swam through the Pacific without a cough
Yet these heathens praise a place they know only in song

The minstrels with their strings have many gifts to bring
And the orchestra with their penguins praise coming Spring
No, I try never to whimper or feel the weight of being alone
Those feelings are to be reserved for people without any bones

Push me this way and I'll go the other
When I was young it was me and my mother
Yet time has a way of pulling you away from who you love
Though the dove still flies as time ticks and shoves

Here in the desert the sky drifts in a different way
Not many people so only the animals here to play
The guns in the hills point toward my tiny shack
When she left she never mentioned when she'd be back

Now I started off on a road where there aren't many signs
Just the one's from above and the unemployment line
If I stick to this too long I know I'll start thinking about that
Stay off the road for there is a wickedness here that smells of a rat

Slipping through winter-grass
you falter, pausing
fall softly back
against summer's wall

Here
in the haze of dust and trees
are shadows playing
of antlered men and women with eagle-heads
saying

"Come by
the paths winding through bedroom walls
standing tall, overlook the
gardens that stretch through books
they smell of lemons.

Come, here you may
follow trams winding through sun-slumped cities
follow the paintings of emerald fish
swimming across marble floors

and you can tour the first world countries
and you can stare into the eyes
of passers-by on trains
watch lights like necklaces plastered against rivers
cities forsaken by gods and rains

Here dogs will sing of your virtues
And chariots their tyres will spring
here markets will sell you filigreed
silver
and ******* fit for kings
(complete with crowns and things)

You may stand aloft on slender buildings
watch traffic swirl by your feet
dip your fingers in amethyst rings
dye your hair in deepest indigo
feast on  rose-coloured sweets

While
stepping
through rain-damped streets
dazed by  sulky pressing aquarium
heat

(aided to press on only by
clay cups of spiced tea)

become transparent
dew-lapped
milk soft
mushroom with lacy edges
variations of delicacy

Exeunt
And
Journeying
be mulberry blooded
carnival skinned
roam through our words heeding nothing
but
dreams and the dreams of dreams."

So saying
these shadows
flick along yellow grass.

But remember kind reader, they
never sought these ways alone
They have never been to mourn
at funerals of lovers or friends

they have not heard the sound of death knells.

So listen, maybe you stay for a bit
Then leave their songs for someone else.
--- --- ---