"Temper your enthusiasm,"
She said,
"The extremes of your reactions;
You should have
A more conventional frame
On which to hang
Your unconventionality."
"Don't push people,"
She said,
"You make yourself vulnerable."

She told me not to rhapsodise,
That it would be difficult,
Impossible, perhaps,
For me to harness my dynamism.
The tone of my work,
She said,
Is often a little dubious.
She said
She thought
That there was something wrong.

That I'm hiding
Some sad
Dark secret from the world.
"Temper your enthusiasm,"
She said,
"The extremes of your reactions;
You should have
A more conventional frame
On which to hang
Your unconventionality."

Imperfectly,
I stand before you,
A man. If you can’t see
All the things that I am,
I’m not content to hang around
As the retirement plan.

I’ll never boss you around,
But that’s not because I’m weak.
It’s because I have the security
To let you be you,
And me, be me.

I stand on my own two feet.
And I don’t ever base my self-esteem
Off some meaningless number
Of late night creeps.

I’ve searched my own deeps, for
A healthy conception of masculinity -
And this is a long-term investment scheme;
So I ask, can you appreciate what patience means?

Without games, on an even plane,
No cliché lines or insincere sayings.
You can always find another “strong-type,”
One of those paper-thin cut outs
From the book of male stereotypes.
Still, truth untold,
We both know -
It’s unconventionality
That makes a diamond
In the rough.

I have learned that
Determining a diamond’s cut grade
Goes well beyond
Simple measurements,
Like width and depth.
To determine
A diamond’s worth,
You have to test
Its light performance.

Even if a stone seems
To have color and clarity,
You can tell a real diamond
By how it catches the light,
Disperses evenly across the rock,
While a fake becomes almost transparent
As saturated light moves through it.

In another poet’s words:
Some [folks] recognize the light
But they can’t handle the glare.

I’ve also learned that appraisal of a diamond
Is determined by its own proportions.
You have to test for symmetry.
Does it seem to be high-grade carat
While you’re around?
And karma, karma, chameleon
To cubic zirconium,
If you’re visiting
The other side of town?

The thing is,
I’m not really here
To expose other contradictions.
I just want you to listen.

I want to talk to you
About how chivalry is not dead.
Look you right in the eye,
And tell you why. Talk
About how romance
Is still very much alive.
So, no more wind-whispered cries,
About how good manners have all but died.

Some might call such confidence conceited,
But I’m not recarving any hieroglyphs.
This type of affection is ancient,
So help to embrace it. Engage we -
With extensive emotional foreplay
And intellectual tongue-kissing;
Way before incense and candles get lit.

And tonight?
Let’s try starting over
With a night out on the town.
The recipe is simple: good food and
a place that's quiet enough for conversation,
maybe a jazz spot, if you’re down.

Or maybe, we could catch
A late-night flick
That really makes us think.
And when we’ve talked ourselves dry,
Neither one of us
Would mean a goodbye,
So we’d retire homewards,
And unwind.

Because I do want you,
The right way.
I want you,
And I want you to want me, too.
I want you to want me,
Just like I want you.

Nevertheless,
No stress for you,
Or for me.
If these rivers are meant
To find their way to the sea,
It should happen, naturally.

My way will be found...
To these "warm waters"
and abundant agave among
a lingering, gentle devil
more potent than that austere burn.

It's the gaze you give me,
though gated by hissing apertures, screens, & skype,
that deters my sensibility. For this unconventionality is certanly fathomed.
Believe me

But it's the glittering glances, shot offscreen in blushful bantering
that
shocks my compass not due south

but to wherever you are.

Eyelids like Terracotta tiles, painted with Salted Wood,
In this Bohemian Magnificence—an appearance of Golden Chrome;
A Contradiction sits in Unconventionality, a Promise of Lovers
In Winter Graves and Spring Cemeteries.

Let the Late Summer Rains flourish the Commas like Grasseeds;
Reap, Sow, and Weep;
Reaped, Sowed, then Wept.

To Whom do you Owe these Trumpet Glares and Immaculate Phrasing?
(Where are the Trumpet Mutes and Wine Glasses?)
Life in the Divine is Life in Vienna—
Life à Douleur resembles Mourning in June.
Show me the Way to go Home—Public, Corporeal Adorations in the Backseat,
Turn left on Palmerston, past Sicilian Cigars and Creole Shrimp;
Towards the Striped Pillowcases and Vaulted Ceilings!
Adorned with our Reflections, of Dried Lavender and Baby’s Breath,
The open Windows let in the Damp Fragrance of Purple Elixirs.

Your Lips, Your Lips Beacon to Tell of my Oriented Past—
And when Midnight comes ‘round, Your Eyes Project my Adolescent Self.
Where did you Find Him?

(You Clutched my Rosary of Constellations in your Left Hand.)

Pain is the only healer I can befriend
Her unconventionality is my only sin
The bait and bleed
Then relief

the little people: and their grand words...
some within reaching the stasus
of colossus,
       while others groveling like
maggots, come back to the collective
unconscious (memory):
        with a stalled craft to make
the morbid fusion of an impetus...
        the grand people:
          and their concern for the lexicon;
secularism had but one advantage,
the holiness of the subconsciousness
of lingua...
              but, apparently, the communist
didn't teach anyone anything,
other than what needed to be minded:
a reiteration of the winding back
of ******* symbolism,
          back: into the clock-face of
resembling an impeding loss of
a status quo...
                         before the altar of
unmoved pieces of chess,
the current, unfathomability of
a "sudden" move...
                  pawn-broker: pawn-maker,
crude: the collection of
   a tsunami mingling with
the antithesis of the holy ghost within
the shackles of:
                            a zeitgeist...
bounty and beauty bound to
the same curator,
            of the fallen curtain
revealing the androids of future
depictions of kings, raised,
subsequently toppled,
   yet nonetheless kept:
   at a leisure...
                         toad-markings
of the first supposed bite...
like a kiss of the enchanted prince...
who kissess, before
             the other churns a bite?!

i might laugh at attire, but,
all of the fashion industry is
structured around ******-*******...

there is still not greater insult
than what other people eat...
and i can't stomach culinary insults...
the omnivore that i am...

how i ate those dried-out fish-snacks
with a St. Petersburg drinker,
and that every-man's orange caviar
i won't even bother to question...
culinary insults... doesn't matter:
can dress the ***,
                   in a king's tug & ware...

culinary insults are the depth upon
which you base making
           fashion "statements"...
    
see... the western concept of the "left"
is Mongolian to me...
                   i, simply, cannot
comprehend it...
                    one would expect:
a rule of thumb;
  instead one receives a conclave
of giving "it": the index finger...

           which isn't even a forfeit of
tipping into narratives of
the current circumstance...    
         in the omnipresent:
membrane - of -
      fragility within the confines
of: being reactant to
whatever enzyme is made
adjusted to thrill,
  or make *******,
             of a future without
                                            a yesterday.

who let the "idiots" in?
mind you: there are no idiots among
pawns, merely sacrificial lambs...
       and who said that grammar
          could be given a religiosity,
and a deconstructionist-dogma-medium
readily stalked, and subsequently
made: unfathomable?
                it could have worked...
    the anti-nationalistic agenda...
         but given the attempts to
puruse a feat of ridiculing the basic
foundation of a, coherent expression
of a coherent acquisition of language,
with not real basis of nation,
  but erroding the prime of
the individual to start a zoology-creep
invigoration?
                
             there are sensibilities than
transcend nationalism...
    as there are sensibilities than make
"transgressions"
      of globalisation...
         grammar is the only orthodoxy
that remains intact from
the segregation of the church and state...

        i already stated that i am,
blissfully unware of a need to take to
engaging in the catholic bureaucracy of
confirmation...
             but a direct attack on grammar
is a self-defeatist mishandling of
secularism...
                             grammar = dogma...

         since can         dada,           truly rule?!

sure, attack grammar,
  with an unconventionality of the use
of language,
   that doesn't assertain a use of language
with the social focus of
    the pleasantries of formalism...
transgress language formalism...
                and, suddenly,
all cobblers become death-aspiring
"artists"...

                  why isn't artist deemed to
by synonymous with gambler?!

      what a bleak picture,
    a fiction that's the fiction of Dicken's
bleak:
                     something or other...

     yet i love being attached to
a current narrative...
          this: culprit conversation
interlude of a people...
                        
               beside the canadian pronoun
incident...
        and using grammar orientated
words...
       can anyone tell me why english
uses so much conjunction-preposition
shrapnel of a bullet to the letter
to the gun with an aimed word?

        papa germanicus uses a lot of
Faustian... conventionality,
of making words into:
  hydrocrabon-length words...
    compounds...
                          without these little
in-between bothersome flies...
        and he is: papa germanicus...
given his:
   well... he's not regarded as
anglo-pomeranian...
            or anglo-bavarian...
aber: ein: schwab!
                     aber: ein anglo-sächsisch...

petulance of a foreign son:
    before an aged, almost non-existent,
father -

gereiztheit von ein fremdsohn,
    vor eine alt, nahezu nicht-gabe,
                     die vater.

zorn: manchmal
            ertriken mein verstand...
  für ein blick von ein herz!

i can't imagine the remants of
Saxon, to be of must gesticulation
in cultural norms,
          when the remains
of the *****,
           are made to stand... schtill.

ęgleesh will not even begin
to bleach me...
           have the globalists and
their tattooed bodies...
           cheap franchise of
a coulrophobia circus...
               now i have a tattoo:
1410!
                                      1918!
apparently eating fungus
         is but one route...
                  of the spider Atlantis-mythos
monkey...
        as became the common practice
of eating
               remnants of
    aquatic genitalia embodied
by oysters:
  ******* poetics,
as in...
                 once you devour the desire
to ****...
               who the **** needs
to paint like a van gogh within
the origins of the trans-African
                      highway toward a today?

I am a vandal of hearts
A collector of the souls of men
Stealing away, for all eternity
Your ability to experience
the tenets of conventional love

My essence, an intoxicating elixir
a cataclysmic force
You will drink of me
I will ensure it
A succulent addictive poison

I will destroy you
Your notions of love and lust
passion and bliss
will be wholly obliterated
once you have experienced
my power, my hunger, my eroticism

I will never commit myself to you
but you will never free yourself of me
My taste
My touch
The storm in my eyes,
My roguish smile
Will haunt your every moment without me

But I will continue provoking chaos
in the hearts and minds of men
To appease my hedonistic desires
for connection, for unconventionality,
for unconstrained passion

The evil temptress incarnate

gamesome, chucklesome, bothersome,
and awesome modest fellow)...
does not deliberately court immortalization,
and wonders what criteria confer elevation,
exaltation, glorification, hero worship,
idolization, veneration, or worship.

I go about a daily humdrum routine
me, a twenty first century baby boomer,
who considers himself passé
and senses with sensibility
he would have been more at home
during the early nineteen hundreds.

At threescore and six years
under my out of this world Kuiper belt,
this wannabe joker here makes the most
of figurative cards I got dealt
despite most every day of my life felt
accursed with mental health issues,
stunted physical growth,
and a split uvula - submucous cleft palate
on very rare occasions, I
(once a slip of a lad
and light as a feather)
got lifted off the ground

and tossed in air by classmates
momentarily suspended as a Great Dane helt
in high regard remembering those happy days
analogous to Reelin’ In the Years
being like a little fish in a big pond
poignant adventures
going out with weathered mariners
actually Norwegian bachelor farmers
tricked out ****** thru and thru
prematurely ******* with joie de vivre
while whipping the rod
hoping hook, line and sinker snags jacksmelt.

Nothing about my person screams
shine the kleiglights (an intense carbon arc lamp,
especially used in filmmaking) on me,
one foo fighting fool on the hill nowhere man,
who hopes to be reincarnated into the ideal of
acuity, bankability, creativity, divinity, ethicality,
fidelity, generosity, humility, integrity, jocundity,
knowledgeability, likability, magnanimity, nobility,
originality, perspicacity, luck quiddity, respectability,
sagacity, tranquility, unconventionality,
versatility, and winnability.

Now just let me get these grubby hands
on well preserved brains of freshly deceased,
and tinker ala Victor Frankenstein.

Yes quite a tall order,
but methinks I can master
genetic engineering (with both eyes closed -
and both hands tied behind my back),
and thwart (once and for all)
the nasty demise of mortality
and promise fail safe solution
to vanquish what people used to consider
the quaint inevitable and unavoidable
courtesy visit by the grim reaper -

depicted as wearing a dark hooded cloak
and wielding a scythe
also known as Hel, Thanatos -
formerly known as Azrael,
and better known as the Grim Reaper
the personification, embodiment,
and spirit of Death
(known throughout the cosmos
for appearing soon after someone died
to deliver their soul to the afterlife),

Psychopomp, or Shinigami
 "la Parca" ("The Robe"), -
a common term for the personification
of death across Latin America
forcing humanity to rethink and reboot
the concept of dying and meeting the maker
essentially making process of death obsolete
unleashing in this lifetime of mine
the solution to upend
the demise of corporeal entity

plus doing away with attendant
emotional and financial toll
final expense insurance policies generate -
whereby unabated longevity
no longer a worry of the past,
but another padding to "nest egg"
recouping set aside monies
to cover the costs incurred
by the death of a loved one,
whether that person

gets buried in a cemetery or cremated
to be become forever vanquished
courtesy creating a untapped market for
twenty blank nth century when speciality
to become a B certified and verified by B Lab
of social and environmental
performance, transparency, and accountability,
which demand to churn out
one after another doctors
named Victor Frankenstein

bringing to life "creature", "fiend",
"spectre", "dæmon", "wretch",
"devil", "thing", "being", and "ogre,"
which high paying specialists
must meet high standards,
whereby the newly hatched mad scientist
receives an bone a fide education
of corpse, whose appreciation acknowledged
by the grateful dead souls
their learning involves combining,

involving artificial intelligence,
reproductive biology and robotics
discovering solutions to synthesize
the best western qualities
and as a dissertation
presenting the most poignant
tragicomic live unrehearsed drama
showcasing the denouement of humanity
trumpeting **** sapiens
bumbling, fumbling, and tabling

after teasing out the box of Pandora
mysteries of development
building neural network describing
linkedin thinking computer systems
deoxyribonucleic acid, and branches
of engineering and computer science
that involve the conception, design,
manufacture and operation of robots
unwittingly as a cautionary tale
whereat smart machines outwit

and then control their creators
with decency, humanity, leniency....
no, not spelling the gloom and doom
of man/womankind,
but rather capitalists freed from labor boon
yet silver lining allows, enables, and provides
old fashioned option to party hardy,
or read all the books in the world
which upside being that human beings
can alway choose exit - stage door left

videre licet euthanasia (voluntary
and pain free suicide),
returning to the closed feedback loop
molecules and atoms
constituting and declaring
each unique personhood
ready and willing to give up the ghost
and buzzfeeding, jump/kick starting
and replenishing the biosphere.