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Julian Jun 2018
The ******* of embezzled glory staunchly defend their counterfeit stature by defalcating the public trust of industrious societies governed internally by compunction and sabotaged externally by the tempests of acerbic fate met with inclement aleatory convergence. To supply a society with ingenuity without being complaisant or officious with unctuous pleas to the overlords we must fashion a new vogue that taps the bustle of giants and aggrandizes the margins to oversee their own creative destinies with scaffolded arrangements of titanic promise and justifiable fluidity to conquer the blinkered dogmatism of a dissolute chastity to inveterate apocryphal tenets of factitious but unmerited perspectives. Democracy crumbles when the convenience of sensationalism supplants the resolve of those that fossick hidden wealth and promulgate validity instead of undergirding pomp with precarious prevarications of duplicitous omission guarded gingerly by the gatekeepers of a ****** sanity that whitewashes the discussion with invented hobgoblins and purblind catharsis. To defeat simplicity and enshrine byzantine elegance as the paragon for voguish commentary rather than abide by a bowdlerized decorum for appeasing simpletons with divisive balkanization through identity politics we can overcome the impediments to human progress that are engineered to persist because of the inertia of the listless and the stubbornness of doctrinaire politicization and invent vivacity and festivity anew. We need to divorce ourselves from pedestrian quibbles of hero-worship that endanger the vitality of the common discourse because of fastidious pedantic disempowerment that ravages us with debased dreams by underscoring nuisances and tolerable nightmares that emasculate the virulence of the liberated individual and subvert his ambitions to contend with a picaresque world of limitless promise and self-motivated internal wealth.
      The bane of modernity is how chary the world becomes because of fractured histories intersecting with controversial destinies and the antidote to that poisonous self-defeating self-censorship is the audacity of brazen challenges to expurgation through assiduous resourcefulness and delicate diplomacy in wrangling controversies with outspoken courage rather than whispered resentment. Temerity waged in inclement circumstance is justified and curiosity stoked by lambent flames of fulgurant individualism should be fortified to the extent necessary to conquer the feckless spoilsports of unctuous puritanism and institutional obedience. The quacksalvers that blather about inconsequence strand the imagination in a desiccated desert that is ostracized from the palettes of the artistic whim to wield efflorescence rather than squander life in pursuit of perfunctory lucre or tenuous solidarity around banal idealism promised by social justice warriors that forget the biggest war being waged on humanity is on the ingenuity of the common discourse and the liberty to opine about real issues rather than saccharine conventions of emasculation through linguistic imprisonment and epicurean slavery to fashimites who relish the buzzword but never the enlightened audience that scoffs at feeble attempts at cultural commentary like Childish Gambino’s “This is America” music video. This particular artifact is a demonstration of how childishly fickle the plebeian mentality really is, stitching together a bricolage of violence to engineer controversy and serenading it with the most banal music imaginable and exhorting people to herald it as a high artform while inundating the world with unimaginative comic book movies and Star Wars rip-offs because of the lucrative business of formulaic replication. “This is America” should be regarded as a parody of itself because of how hackneyed its design is and how cacophonous it sounds and mocks its audience with lowbrow tactics of adding tinsel to trash and marketing it as the glory of tatterdemalions rather than the refinement of true cinematic achievements that have been relegated because Warhol’s Campbells-Soup-consumerism trumps true belletrist in the public view.
        Cultural watersheds punctuate our history with salient achievements in experimentation, but the formulaic profiteering of buzzword sensationalism and yellow journalism and the ostentatious glorification of promiscuous boasting and fancy cars tantalize the mice to continue playing slot machines rather than penning a novel or doing something promethean. The world scoffs at Trump but ignores the bigger institutional caveats that endanger us much more than a pragmatic albeit unconventional pontificator who is complicit in constructing a false narrative to enslave mindless people to fret about eminence rather than delight themselves in the consequential nuances of established refinement that used to serenade the world with flourish and spectacle. The world kowtows to the crusade against flavor-of-the-week enemies of the liberal-conservative syncretism because it has been conditioned to believe that synthesis is the only logical solution for the polarized worldviews of churlish people that become parvenus not on their merits but on their marketable pitfalls and their public foibles. Peccadillos are more important to people than virtues and this makes society morally bankrupt if we loiter around Astroturf causes that have been infiltrated by corporatism and venal debauchery and acquiesce as disempowered gossip hounds that hunt in packs to find jest in aberration rather than achievement in self-created narratives that defy the stupid purblind boorishness of the mainstream media and its haughty liberalism or the persnickety condemnation of priggish conservative moralities that had an expiration date 50 years ago. Who the **** cares about transgender-touting-gender-fluidity quidnuncs and the snooty obsession with lurid personal endeavors of reputable people that made minor ****** transgressions in a world policed by wide-eyed feminazis that seek to ransack men of their vital virulence to spotlight their unjustifiable oppression. Women are oppressed but the carnal nature of their calumniation and their vindictive powers of persuasion are deployed with such vehement vigilance and such distaste for the majority that the world relegates itself to quibbles of celebrities rather than substantive issues. There is a systemic feminization of society occurring that seeks to demarcate despotic uxorious pleasantries as an incarceration of vocal dissent against supercilious women and their tamed men that slavishly grovel in repudiation of anything prickly.  Men historically have oppressed women but the solution to this quandary isn’t a reverse discrimination where the minority concern is spotlighted as a majoritarian issue that overshadows the disproportionate nature of our society where nominal accreditation is afforded in a non-meritocratic way to absolve people of their carnality and demote the vigorous defense of human liberty as secondary to compromise solutions that appease more people than they offend but simultaneously result in suboptimal conditions that reward arbitrarily coachable people while jettisoning anyone witty enough to be capable of insubordination of a hedonistic epicurean world obsessed with appearance and ravaged by the decadence of formulaic profiteering at the expense of originality and true promethean art that is herculean enough to defy hackneyed tropes and siphon the best elements from a piecemeal world variegated with complexity but stifled by fomented hatred.
The solutions to these problems is to create a watchdog group of artistic critics who become eminent and ubiquitously heard enough to offer creative consultation to the artistic endeavors that we consume and the music that is curated for fastidious ears that crave euphonic originality rather than the banality of easily dovetailed bass-heavy cookie-cutter garbage and the gaudy tactics of talentless rappers whose swagger derives from  the intersection of opportunism and the divestiture of an industry that rewards gloated supercilious epicureanism and meretricious marketability. Am I the only one jaded by second-rate superhero movies that infest the cinemas that borrow from Michael Bay while thrusting pulse-pounding but narratively bankrupt movies down the throats of consumers that might prize the cinematic originality of the heyday of filmmaking? Is it always high art to invent controversy that is witless or half-witted just because it will create buzz? Shouldn’t we condemn the laziness of society in acquiescing to the penury of the modern cultural narrative which belabors the dead horses of racism and sexism ad nauseum? Shouldn’t we fight the war of against inequity through legislation rather than hibernating about scandalous eminence and testy malfeasance?
          Liberty should be championed above all else and we are turning our backs on the future unless we muster the resolve to diminish the sway of the common narrative and aim our spotlight at consequential endeavors rather than the tropes of prosaic and pedestrian bastardization of art and culture. We need to fight artistic laziness which has ravaged our culture and castigate the tactics of wannabee celebrities that use lurid tactics to attract an audience by bedizening themselves with Pyrrhic ostentations and rampant fakery to create more melodrama in a world that needs to be less histrionic. YouTube celebrities swarm us as they get high on ******* and lean-- at our expense-- and vandalize property and convincing nine-year-old’s like Lil Tay to flex her money like it is infinitely renewable in a finite world where all our attention is wasted on artless artifice of less talented people that know how to engineer a ruckus by strutting themselves beyond all decency and selling out to a corporatist nightmare of enslaved convenience. We need to be more vocal about the dissolution of artistic merit and the formulaic repetition of successful formulas that jade us and make us yawn about another retread of a previously successful idea that is milked to the point of cruelty.                                                         ­                       
       Let’s change the narrative and focus on creating true art rather than reacting to the meretricious tinsel of the vogue consensus which is so impotent in its ability to rivet audiences because it has become so notoriously lazy. Fight laziness in art, dismiss your news feeds, be resourceful, seek true happiness rather than find yourself hoodwinked and duped by the idea that Trump is the most important issue or getting caught in thought loops and brooding about sexism and inequality. Let us strive to be egalitarian but within limits that would also appease hominists rather than just the hypertrophy of the leftist narrative that seeks to cage us with the doublespeak of complaisant conformity.  Reject the unctuous charlatans that pretend priggishness when their banausic purpose is barbaric but beguiling to be a lullaby for laggards. We need to fight for the future of civilization rather than hobnob with convenience and loiter around decrying false perpetrators rather than systemic injustices that could otherwise be rectified if enough people fought for it. We can invent a future that is a great festivity serenaded by cultivated artistic refinement and forget about the trifles that divide us. United in ambition and fueled by ingenuity we can defeat artistic laziness and be resourceful with how we decide what is newsworthy. Spurred by the argosy of proactive motivation we can change the world in a substantial way by deciphering the subtext that governs the world. The subtext is everything!
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
.do you really need a disclaimer, for this sort of work? no, not really... it's not exactly being allowed the equivalency of dropping an in excess of 2000mg of paracetamol.

the one aspect of legacy media, that still has some viability, akin to rekindling the famous extract from the movie: all the presidents men... is concerns for metal health issues of youngsters, who didn't have, the, "privilege" of being exposed to internet ergonomics, other than within the confines of gaming, they came far too late for, what replaced mp3 sharing.... ideas are not exactly sound-bites of copyright infringement...

**** me... do i really have to slap then punch
myself in the face, to remotely stay
awake while drinking ***** like pepsi
sharpshooters?
     i guess so...

   i too, "suffered" from roman bulimia,
the classical kind...
   don't ask me how i managed to make
the esophagus contender of the heart,
muscle...
                 at first it was cheap choc down
the throat, missing on brushing my
teeth for 48 hours...
   then... ******* down the throat,
like the ****-style gimmick of the Watergate
informant...
       came back up, bundled in quasi turds
packages...
               classical Roman bulimia -
eat, regurgitate, eat some more,
hell, now you have a Pompeii style
banquet of the coming of age...
laxatives?
that's no bulimia...
  bulimia is an extension of an ancient
Roman practice, akin to throwing yourself
****-naked into a nettle shrub area...
to get the "itches"...
     that method, involved in energizing
the neuron extension of the skin...
              it's a "placebo" itch...
   nettles, ancient Romans,
and bulimia like the rite of a loss of
virginity of kings...
      festering at its core... of the French court...
with a *****'s teaching apparatus,
leveraging the use of, a single "tool"...
           and even though the ancient Romans
never reached my people...
i get to abuse their phonetic encoding stratum...
bulimia... sure... i, "suffered" from it...
not really, no... i ******* enjoyed
the regurgitation process...
   anti-Grecian pederasty gimmick...
(a) taking a ****
   (b) oral regurgitation
   imitating an ancient Roman banquet
(c) / (d) ensuring the two entry points
are filled by an external source -
wishing for vanilla custard *******...
none to be...
    oops...
               so no one taught these girls
about ancient Roman bulimic
practices?
   you work on the esophagus...
                       by the time i finished
the transition period...
  i automated the esophagus reaction...
like training gymnastics for a six-pack...
no longer ******* down the throat...
you say charge? i think of
a rhino juggernaut...
           so no one bothered these girls
introducing ancient methodologies
to their predicament?
    no training of the esophagus,
no two (index + middle) fingers down
their throat to ease their larynx from
a gagging order?
    none of it?
   they'll grow out of it!
i did...
       drink a liter of ***** per day
and i'm feeling: shimmy!
          upon each nocturnal investment
that i translate into writing...
      anorexia?
    give them excess coffee...
              or strong cider...
      the most pristine aperitif...
    you can't cure anorexia with either
drips or syringes...
   you need aperitifs...
                     but please don't give them
white vinegar...
           you need a balance of alcohol
overcoming the sugars...
     strong beer is alcohol overcoming
starches... won't work...
     coffee and sugar helps...
  both simulate the pristine form of
the marijuana *****...
             it's not poison...
so why should i care?
   oh but i do care... reading this article...
troubled teenagers dodge Instagtram
   curbs on photos glorifying self-harm
...
ever tried burning out a cigarette tip
on your knuckle?
   ever wondered about
    warming up a hand of scissors and
giving yourself an indie tattoo?
   while at the same time...
relying on the mouse principle?
i.e. remaining pipsqueak clean from
making any noise?!
              cutting is so crass...
so unimaginative...
  you will not achieve the adrenaline *****
status of a stab-victim...
   there is no element of surprise...
but...
     if you really want to ingest pain?
hmm... hmm?
            heat up a scissor arm...
   and put it against your skin...
            and then... EAT... the pain...
with what you can surmount in and with,
silence...
                   cutting is too... dramatic...
at least burning yourself you have
not achieved the stature of a shedding blood...
cleaner, more effective,
think of orange recycling bags
collected at the start of the week...

              **** me though...
you seen the comradely behavior
of competing athletes, at the european
championships in Berlin,
   with the pole vaulters?
   Armand Duplantis -
congratulated for having crossed
the 6m benchmark of respectability...
now... that's sport!
football, soccer, basketball,
call it what you like...
   that's not sport, that's business,
that's advertisement...
     that's concussion cover-ups...

Epke Zonderland? also a doctor...
communist Poland believed in
sport, sport on the side,
   sport was never to reach status
of a mono-career investment...
            most of the local football
players from my hometown,
also worked less hours in
the metallurgy plant...
                  that's sport...
   a healthy balance...
which, mainstream sport is lacking...
oh look...
   the women doing the hammer throw,
or the discus...
   not exactly Vogue / Chanel catwalk
material...
    mandible beauties...

    to be honest? the doping affair
in the Olympic sports?
   but a minor setback of credibility...
     i rather watch that...
   than those pitiable 22 ballerinas in soccer.
Amitav Radiance Aug 2014
The wilderness is the blank space
Where the minds can roam free
A canvas for us to paint our imagination
Happy minds devoid of any anxiety
Fresh breath of life in the empty space
Where do we take refuge if destroyed?
Wilderness is the bank space to treasure
Explore and find all the answers
For the unimaginative they have no relevance
Among the wilderness we embrace life
Joyce May 2012
When, instead of cozying in bed
I wander out there with Kerouac,
Imagining that I am Kerouac
Or some slave who walks upright;
Or a priest without a crowd
With hands and feet tied.
When, instead of snoring like hell,
I am left unimaginative by some;
I am making disgusting Love with shadows unknown
And remain pinned against the wall.
I am some nine year old senile who wets her bed
in fear and disbelief.
Lights flicker and then fade
And the switch becomes a button pressed to send
Someone in raving comfort.
I am not a stranger to sleepless nights
Even when night becomes noon.
Nightmares haunt me no more but I
Am left haunted by my bed.
Sheets crumpled by tossing and turning.
My bed does not recognize my warmth.
Voice recordings and constant tweetings
Pump blood to my Über active head.
Sleepless nights are well received as my body
Succumbs to sleep.
I live in a different world with five hundred other names
And the ten thousand other Me’s are all in disarray.

(And when the clock chimes at one, two, three ‘til way down six,
There’s a carnival of sorts with hair strands flailing like
Seven sets of arms.)

I am not a stranger to sleepless nights
And wetting my bed is not a Sin.
I am sinful beyond recognition, as my bed is my witness.
I have had different beds
But to me, they’re all the same.
Some, soft; others, too hard
Or covered in satin, exaggerated by the moonlight. Some, made of wood
While others, with tight springs.
Water’s absurd but so is steel.
Double padding, triple linings, four feet, at times, none;
There’s the car, the guest room, the floor, hospital bed,
A seat next to a complete stranger ---
I make my bed before sleeping
And leave it when I’m done.
I am not a stranger to sleepless nights
And I jump on the bed at midnight.
I am not a stranger to morning tides and the morning shows on TV.
I’m not a stranger at all, no,
And when I sleep, I sleep in peace.
Stranger things have happened
Noons and sudden weekends are no way sleep - inducing; I am left believing
That nights and days dance in my
Sleeplessness.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
you stop fearing death once you stop dreaming, and treat sleep like a cruise-ship holiday of complete darkness - i mean, who'd drag imagination down into the unconscious to create dreams, rather than keep it boiling conscious of limbs and skeleton in being awake, and write a poem or two? i know, when restrictions come, cashier no. two thousand and five hundred, when people are shoved into pits and black holes they recreate their imaginative spirit in sleep, they dream... imagination not utilised in the waking hour is worth a bundle of entertaining patterns, as in: how does light enter utter darkness? the most vivid dreamers are the most unimaginative people, esp. with conversation starters, let alone main meals (relationships), and desserts (commuter silences and lost eye-contact).*

i write                                                 because
                   i don't
   like                                     talking.
Izzy Stoner Jul 2013
I was at a party the other day
I don't usually go to parties
I don't like crowds
I don't like gatherings
I don't like, new people.
But I'm here as a favour to a friend,
And so I stand in this hovel
That looks like the dodgy part of *****
Or the ganglands of Gomorrah,
Pathetically clutching my long empty beer bottle
And breathing in air that's more smoke than oxygen.
Desperately hoping
That if I pretend to be drunk enough
I wont have to meet anybody new.

But as luck would often have it
As luck and I do not get on
My friend beckons me from a darkened corner
Surrounded by people I don't know.
She's confident, enigmatic and wants me to come over.
And because I owe her a favour I cant say no
And so I trudge towards her with all the enthusiasm
Of an arthritic Labrador, dragging my hind legs
Across the sweat stained carpet
Bracing myself for someone new.

And as I place one foot in front of the other
I can practically see the outline of the gallows.
And I notice that the walls really are an especially ugly colour
And that boy surely isn't old enough to be drinking without permission from his mother.
And someone please tell those guys not to put the owners dog in the oven.
And I wonder if I should break up those limb tangled lovers
Because I hear that that one, who's dating that one, gave that one chlamydia
and suddenly the air is too thick
And too hot
But my feet will not stop.
Because I owe my friend a favour.
But this hideous carpet might as well be an ocean
Because believe me, I'm drowning, adrift.
This feels like I've left my stomach
Somewhere four feet behind me
And I've always been so used to listening to my gut.

This is not fear, this is anxiety
The two are so easily confused, but
Unfortunately by now I know the difference
More intimately than many people do.
Fear is a cold steel
Sharp knife, with smooth un-serrated edges
That drives into your chest or your head or your belly
And it takes what it wants from you, and then is wrenched back out
And its painful, but its usually there for a reason.
Fear can be conquered
Don't laugh I've seen it
Fear grapples with the human spirit in the eyes of every
Soldier still fighting
No matter what the battlefield.
Be it desert or office or kitchen or playground.

But anxiety is fears younger cousin
and it is a wire sponge against your chest
Like the ones they use on cleaning dishes.
And it grates at you until you're raw
And scrubs at every inch of skin
There's hardly a moment when you're not itchingly pink
Until it feels as though your ribs are utterly exposed
And every eye is fixed on what you hide within.
But that's not the worst thing about it.
That's not what drives you every second, mad.
I can handle the razor winged moths that make a home in my stomach
The worst, is the irrational nature of this relative of fear.

I should not be afraid to open my mouth
To be seen, and immediately judged
Even though I know in reality
The most important people won't reckon me
On the first impression, first look, first word.
But I still am
I am scared, and that is terrifying.
And I know that this might just pass
It could be teenage angst
My lack of self confidence holding me back.
But whatever it is.
Right now, it is Everest.
So don't you dare tell me just to get over it.

But as I sidle up beside my best friend, I know she doesn't understand
And I hope she never does.
One, Two, Three.
Three people who are new,
Three epinephrine shots of irrational anxiety pumping through my blood.
And she smiles so encouragingly,
All yellow and marmoset eager.
And I take one, two, three deep breaths of smoky air,
And let my mind play marionette to the corners of my mouth,
Tugging them into a smile that's somewhat believable.
And the first word that tumbles out of my mouth is a hideously unimaginative,
“Hey.”
But they don't seem to mind.

This small talk we're making, that for me is colossal
Gradually settles the pinpricks of venom beneath my skin
Into something entirely more manageable.
And by the end of the night
Two of those three people are no longer somebody new.
And I feel as though I've made the progress of a few meters
In climbing my Everest.
But there's still miles and miles to go.  
But the thing to remember...
What I must remember,
No matter what mountain anxiety builds for you,
Be it Atlas or Snowdon,
Be it at a school, or an office or at home,
Every step that we make, on our own or pushed forward by friends
Is another meter or mile, on this arduous road
That will eventually lead to a summit, ten times more beautiful
Than the valley we just left below.
Jamie Cairns Sep 2013
There is an energy flowing through me
A fire to consume all things

An electricity from the top of my head to the tips of my fingers

The need to create
The need for words to pour out like water from a dam

Words to change the meaning of creation
Words to end time itself

But pen goes to paper
and it drops dead.
Nat Lipstadt Apr 2014
Conjunction:
a small class of words distinguished in many languages by their function as connectors between words, phrases, clauses, sentences

- the act of conjoining; combination; the state of being conjoined; union; association:

- a compound proposition that is true if and only if all of its component propositions are true.

- the coincidence of two or more heavenly bodies at the same celestial longitude.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am in a relationship.

a colorless word
a word of no clarity
a good one? a bad one?
a professional deal,
or one that makes you squeal
with pleasure or despair

without context or content,
a description of a status,
not a state,
but a quid pro quo

I prefer
I am in a conjunction

well recall the day
our orbits
more than crossed,
but synchronized,
when two bodies
began to travel
upon the same longitude
one direction
in conjunction

t'was the day we coordinated
on our mobile phone,
co-configured our future,
our calendars


nowadays,
I answer her questions
while she is commencing to think,
when her foolishness prevails,
she questions, "did you remember to..."
my answer, a question returned,
connected, constant and conjunctive,

"and what's my name?"
an answer conveying constancy

relationship
oft the farthest place from logical,
but you know that,
say I am in a conjunction
and the logicians will celebrate
the end of your lonely celibacy,
well they understand the truth
inherent in and of and about
your compounded proposition


what unimaginative creatures we be,
dispensing with beauty for factuality,
but facts are easily misread,
your fact and my fact, relationship,
the exact same fact, conveys neither
an agreement as to what that means

are we unionized, associated, or conjoined
what is the quality of
our related ships?


so
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
amend my status please,
post me
as being in a state of:
a) conductivity b) connectivity c) concoctive

no, none of those
capture
what we have
captured,
so let create a new state,
a new world,
using a very old world word
post us as follows,
"Nat is in a conjunction"
No swooning allowed
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
variation in what's dyslexic in English:          roy-     (+)     -al - like Al Pacino - or? roy-       (+)        -all - a different slug for a tongue caged behind the 32; alternatively say: casino royal - two pronunciations of the same word, and no distinctive two-lane stresses added to say them intentionally with variance - basically one variation is missing an acute a (á) - alter to acute: dentistry's alphabet - say A - you end up adding an invisible hark of prolonging a sound from ~aye into ahhhh; the tetragrammaton is more than a noun, the Hebrews didn't see it coming, the two H variations are involved in how diacritical marks are asserted and used - i too thought it was something to do with déjà vu  - but it turns out it isn't that simple - how diacritical marks are asserted and used, or upon second suggestion: how they're not used, and what complications arise from omitting them.

for someone as concerned with people's ****** lives
as *richard von krafft-ebing
was,
with his mangum opous: psychopatia sexualis -
i'm surprised he didn't throw a *** party -
stage an **** - richard brautigan apparently read
this Victorian - may i say trash? -  compendium
and giggles with friends; modernity has no stamina
for the seemingly idyllic *** lives of bowler hat
gentlemen - a sample from psychopatia sexualis:
homosexual feeling as an acquired manifestation
of box sexes (the androgynous stipend to exercise
all mouth **** and ****) - however you like it,
quote: almost every self-****** individual (originally
masturbator) at last reaches a point where, frightened
on learning the the results of the vice, or on
experiencing them (νευρασθενια), or leg by example
or seduction to the opposite ***, he wishes to free himself
of the vice and re-instate his ****** life.
you could say that, unless of course you're put off
when a girl reads you a questionnaire from the cosmopolitan
magazine, and you've seen too many Jame Bond movies,
or heard stories - or how you figured: well,
totalitarian governments aided heterosexual marriages,
championed them with the standard myths,
democracy doesn't really do that... democracy likes
the odd fetish... hence with the aid of science the fetish
marriages - surrogate prostitutes aplenty -
that's not ONE HOUR AT £120 A POP... THIS IS NINE MONTHS!
someone once lived and said: Jews and homosexuals run
the show - i think it might have been a Bukowski citation -
yeah, but who's the audience and not the puppets?
the politically, what's the word? ah, uncomfortable -
there's a strategic unit in medicine that's not the MI5
or the MI6 that deals with them under the alias P.S. -
not post-scriptum, but paranoid schizophrenic -
formerly known as premature dementia -
to me creative, to others worth sedating - meaning:
why would i write about western society in defence or
in apologetic language like C. S. Lewis and his love
affair with Christianity when i'm pretty sure i'm not
writing about utopia? why? oddly enough niece is also
said likewise for Nice - or 'aw, how nice.'
staged on the promenade des anglais - is this a clue?
anyone in touch with the security forces?
could be a pattern clue - now there are two fronts to be
worried about, the achoo right - boy, what a sneeze,
and the already involved actors -
mind boggling, how, ever, could, it, have, happened?
and i swear language was intended to be flexible,
like a gymnast - flex flex flex - which is strange that
the unimaginative always attack from their rat cages
bewildered at seeing a way out of a maze and then blocking
it (e.g. Ezra Pound, mm, the prime fascist of them all) -
it's called censorship, but in the west it's hardly a Stalinist
plot (believe, it's not utopia, i don't understand this
collective delusion that it is - somehow - and indeed,
somehow it isn't - it's called a superiority complex -
the same happened in Iraq - coverage almost zero -
subterfuge requests all over the media - now i have to live
as ethnically placed in close alignment with the people
that regurgitate all this hype - i have absolutely no reason
not to fake a clownish tear and whatnot -
it just is. so yeah, why didn't rich von krafft-ebing throw
an ****? a swingers' ball to cure all the pathology noted?
even now, or *** lives are hardly concerning -
why poets **** over the book of genesis
and leave the other books to themselves - reducing
the book of exodus into only one pair leaving -
it becomes harder and harder to relate to these books
and the people that venerate them after reading Don Quixote -
it really does - it's almost like talking to an illiterate literate
person - as agonising as it is to say it, it's exactly that.
i wonder if anyone bothered including the prefix in-
to all the scientific words in the dictionary - denoted:
in-pathology, in-sanity etc. - i.e. the first person accounts -
i do it because i would hate to go back to the gym
and complications of talking over a sunday roast -
my life in a nutshell? my laptop was so ***** that i decided to
clean it today - anti-bacterial wipes and dried with kitchen towels -
i thought the mouse of the laptop was broken,
ages ago i bought a mini-mouse with a USB port -
after cleaning the laptop, to my disbelief, the laptop mouse
started working (you know, that little touch-patch of plastic
towing two clicks) - that's life, uncomplicated -
a marvel to behold such daily problems - bound by choice
we choose what is to worry us - the next
chapter in my adventure with Kant?
the critique of all theology pouring out from the
speculative principles of the mind -
so for i've passed the ontological, the cosmological
and the theologically-physical impossibilities for the
existence of an absolutely necessary being - even if atheists,
we're all chipping in - basis? presupposition of such
a being and argued counter (cf. Satanic rebellion) -
not the agnostic quasi-supposition (basically speculative
tact) - at 274 (page no.) ending at 442 (page no.) -
oh i'll finish it - transcendental methodology should
be interesting - it's just a question of how much distraction
becomes fused with blank pixel pages and my irritability
as to how or why poetry ought to be stripped from
banal / predictable technique - rhyme is definitely go,
listen to BBC Radio 1 at any time and you can just hear
rhyme ****** - well, if painting could be stripped down
further than cubism - i don't see why poetry
can't have conversational overtones to it, one of the few
unearthed secrets of modern intimacy, just sitting there,
like ducks.
Third Mate Third Aug 2014
A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.


Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting ******, which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig, got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road received a particularly blunt rejection letter that simply read, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

So even if you’re an utterly fantastic writer who will be remembered for decades forthcoming, you’ll still most likely receive a large dollop of criticism, rejection, and perhaps even mockery before you get there. Having been through it all these great writers offer some writing tips without pulling punches. After all, if a publishing house is going to tear into your manuscript you might as well be prepared.

1. The first draft of everything is ****. -Ernest Hemingway
2. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ***. -David Ogilvy
3. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
4. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. -Paul Theroux
5. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. — Harper Lee
6. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ― Jack London
7. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell
8. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ― W. Somerset Maugham
9. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
10. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
11. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
12. If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
13. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
14. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
15. Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, ****, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘****’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
18. Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
19. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
20. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
21. Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
image – christine zenino
Taken from the Internet
Ena Alysopriono Jan 2015
"Where's the *** gone?"

"I've got a jar of dirt!"

"So you are all going to fight them, and you are all going to fight them all on the account of him wanting to **** him?"

"Jack. Where's Elizabeth."
"She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for it just like you promised. So we're all men of our word, really... except for Elizabeth, who is, in fact, a woman."

"The lies I told you were not lies"
"You lied to me by telling me the truth?"
"Yes"
"That's good, can I use that?"

"You know when you are standing in a high place and suddenly have the urge to jump?
…I don't have it"

"And that was without even a single drop of ***."

"You have a cruel mind, Jack Sparrow."
"Cruel is a matter of perspective"

"You know, for all that pirates are clever clogs, we are an unimaginative lot when it comes to naming things."

"Aye, the original plan was to use nine pieces of eight to bind Calypso, but when the first court met the Brethren were, to a one, skint broke."
"So change the name!"
"To what? "Nine pieces of whatever we happened to have in our pockets at the time?" Oh yes, that's very piratey!"
Love these movies. They're so weird it's hilarious.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2017
at this point, i really don't know where to begin, in all earnet;
   this might seem unfathomable, but it's the case...

perhaps i'll begin from the end:
       ć - a shortening of ch -
                            and the case of unimaginative nouns,
say: the noun table, or chair...
       they're dull...
                           inanimate things tend to
have dull indentifications - they're dull nouns,
      they resemble the nature of the thing being named,
they don't move, they don't speak...
        but esp.                       they don't bloom -
and there's no hope for a revival of them...
   that table? that chair? it has no hope in any attempt
to return to its former, original form, i.e. a tree.

            but you already have two perfectly good
examples of a linguistic transgressions, and what's
   truly, nothing more laziness -
           the czech (check) republic...
                     what's the other one?
****... off the top of my head: i can't remember.
  
    we are talking about the second dimension of applied
diacritical marks, aren't we?
   ć     - the acute syllable scalpel is identified
                when the **** of iota enforces itself -
in an e.g. cieć (loosely... a trickle of **** from
                                                  a wound)....
                      what these symbols actually are,
are not necessarily idiosyncrasies, particular to whatever
particular they are designated to...
    look at them as punctuation marks,
             but not between words, instead within words;
sure, the ć example can only be interpreted
                     as sharpening the ch / cz compound...
because single letters are, after all, atomic.
                and there are ways of hiding -
      a č hides the z or the h: depending what
part of europe you're from...
                     but in the west they still know how to
pronounce czech republic... but have a hard time
    pronouncing the car manufacturer's logo:
              škoda - that's sh- / sz-      -koda....
                     that's being ******* rude, you don't
just avoid that sign... what? you think those people put
it up: so that it looks "pretty"?
                     the fact that škoda = szkoda (sh)
    in another langauge, and means oh well is another
matter.

    no, what really got me going to write this piece
begun as a rumour... yet another attack in germany...
football fans, bombs under buses...
         even the sadist in me (if there ever was one)
  thinks real hard about enjoying the amalgam
                        rooted in ethnicity of my nation's
former enemies... i'm really going to cringe on that point;
i cringe at white men dancing the new zealanders'
                                         - haka -
(māori)                            ergo?                      ­háka;
see it's a human decency to put "punctuation" marks
onto words... a bit like putting a kippah in a synagogue...
      so you get to then write:     ha!     ka!
           the phonetic incision in the second syllable
                                   it not necessary;
but hey! they mustered enough ***** to state in
condensed macron form a prolonging:
                             i.e.                        maa'ori.
actually, given the **** of iota, i'd write that as
                                            maa'o'rí -
         like the last letter is throwing something real
akin to a torero's                                    olé!

    what i am lamenting is the indecency of the english
language... in that they don't practice the aesthetic
of diacritical appropriation, and having acquired this
language aged 8, and having synthesised it for, oh 20 odd
years, analysing it has shown me that the english
language is far too peppered with minute idiosyncracies
that are beyond a chance of a diacritical approach being
established... as i already stated,
       czech - that word has no place in the uniform
rules of otherwise english, in matra form true here, true
there, true throroughly
.
                       combine the eastern variant of
the western "sensibility" and all you get is: chech -
                                                             chalk-cheque.
                   you can't apply diacritical indicators to ease
the suffering of dyslexics when timing their syllable
intake... you really hear hardly anything of dyslexia
in poland... maybe because there are clear incisor
                                        "coordinates" in the words?
                      like commas descending from on high?

but as the title indicates, this is but a minor point,
what bugged me today was -
     the east sports birds as emblems of their nationhood
status...
     the west? ******* flowers.

the scots?             a thistle.
   the irish?      a clover.
the english?     a rose.
            the dutch?              a tulip.
   the french?   a ******* lily!

           coming from a people that has an eagle
as its national emblem, i thought:
                         how about we choose a flower for
ourselves, and imitate these former angry colonial *******?
but on an implosive basis, so we bite into the rocks
   and slur out the words:      i'm not moving!

so i asked an older soul...
- given the above examples, what flower could contend
                  to be the naational flower of poland?
- well... there's the malwa (malva - mallow)
                 and there's the dalia (dahlia).

   i actually can remember the scent of a mallow,
the flower as such doesn't smell of anything,
   a bit like a jasmine....
                                              the leaves have the distinct
perfume, just like nettles have the distinct itch
protruding from their stems....
                                  but i was like:
   sure the mallow could be a national emblem of poland...
       but i was like: that doesn't go back to the root
of my curiosity...
                         some nouns sound so much better
in your native tongue...
       i know it's not a flower...
                   but when you're walking in the ancient
heart of your soul, that's a pine forest...
                    and you spot a bush
         and it's a paproć   (ferns!) -
                                i'll choose that as the nation's emblem...
sure, the mallow does have a nostalgic potency
to remember my great-grandmother who survived
           the second world war...
                                      but i kinda like the word
      paproć.... plus, it wouldn't be clever to imitate
western nations, with their....    FLOWER! POWER!
    i really have to make a cryptic joke by now:
   lauren sauthern = leonid brezhnev = gordon brown.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2019
i can clearly hear how english mutates...
a book review by a channel... better than food...
the book he's reviewing is goETHE's captain faust:
and the non-avengers...
but no...

i don't hear: stick an umlaut anywhere you please...
i, "for some reason"... do not hear
a: Θ... a göethe... or a goëthe (ladin alphabet -
the germans know about this)...
there is this... goe-ether association...
it's sometimes a riddle of goë, göe...
or quiet simply...
the remains of the ancient latin grapheme (œ)?

educated people make this distinction -
and they'll catch "you" out on it...
since... they represent the Hyacinth Bucket brigade...
gynocentrism doing a snail-trail:
one step forward... two steps back...
it's beside what the linguist "says":
a bucket is a bucket a ***** is a *****...
otherwise? glorifying such a harsh reality
of a surname like: bucket... but not beckett?
no... "samuel"? well then...
it's not a bucket if it's somehow
translated via chernobyll as: bouquet...
is it?! is it?
because even in french: they self-cannibalise...
i.e. they "eat" some letters...
they write one language: but speak another...
what isn't bucket what is nonetheless
bouquet? well... isn't it: bouque-?
it's not even that... boo-k for the ones that
still hear... and can write grafitti schlang...
in some variation of a german...

becuase educated people can get away
with treating GOETHE...
as?  '/ˈɡɜːrtə, ˈɡeɪtə'...
or in simple-me-and-you being bilingual...
fiddling around we arrive at:
Göerte... which is "said"...
but this "lunatic asylum" exception has
to be written: with a clarity of a *******
Greek THETA... a fin! the end!
which always makes lying easier...
when you can: say (a)... but... but...
imply (b)... like some "metaphor"...
some forever useful tool of nuance...
some "spectacle"...
it's easier to lie when... you say (a)
but are "implying" (b)...
then you can blame it on...
not allow the literacy of the masses:
quite as much... you require... exceptions
to the rule... to **** out the lesser educated
"people"...

don't get me started...
born? Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski...
perhaps i should have never left...
3 years in Edinburgh...
over a month in St. Petersburg...
somewhere in Paris, Stochholm, Venice...
Athens... Belgrade from a distance...
Amsterdam... two weeks in Kenya...
and a nonchalant attitude surrounding
London... a strong distaste for Warsaw...
a myth of Cracow...

and no, i haven't been everywhere...
but... after a while... does it really matter
where you go, if you're bringing
expectations with you?
expectations and postcards?
clichés? clichés expectations and postcards?
and... a whole lot of strangers
you haven't met?
tourism and: feeding the ghost town
mentality... perhaps a ghost town would be
something to behold... instead of this...
atypical metropolitan casualness of avoiding
each other... busier busier: and no more
busy than once pronounced dead...
but wait for it: you're at least given a "scene"...

but no... i know one language that
makes pedantic orthographical observations...
but i also know a language that...
write one way... speaks another...
whichever way, best, to suit it...

and you "know" it would only be Fa-Ber'g -
no... borrow the j- from je suis...
if that last E was not an acute É...
but an grave È (grave... or? gráve...
grrrr'av... not a hey hey grave...
GRA-Vity)...

hence? my point exactly..
if the diacritical markers are respected
in fwench... with an acute É and a grave È...
why do "we" need... I(i) and J(j)?
why not... I(ı) and J(ȷ)?

besides... ever imagine writing an autobiography
like a Knausgård... defender of the runes
for a sentence in volume 1...
major google-maps ****** *** volume 2...
i write that with a "glee"...
i mean... you can be immediately be put off
writing an autobiography...
just to avoid the mediocre descriptive elements
of using something more complicated
than a hammer...
for an otherwise... less than a hammer's worth
of banality: evaluation of modern banality /
procrastination...
no one we have been given these complicated
tools... and to the best of our abilities we
best procrastinate, using them...
i hardly think a hammer would be used
to... pretend to play the drums...
but yes: Knausgård... the defender of runes...
irony... but the mr. google-earth guy to turn to...

yes... and before i discovered a past...
there were the runes... and there was
forever this latin morph of the barbarians
"thieving"... but there was also the glagolitic script...
apparently! and before that there was the greek!
and... somehow... i did arrive at having
to master some vague understanding of
mother cyrillic!

- but prior to... did you know what
slavs love cabbage? all the pakistani point this
out: slav love cabbage!
today? i watched the film Layer Cake
and made some cabbage soup...
Layer Cake being? the pre-to-a-bond-film
taster for the actor Daniel Craig...
it was hardly a Guy ******* Ritchie film...
woz itz? but... a decent actor advert...
with "hindsight"...
if i watched the film then...
or as i whatched the now...
and all the known actors jumped the train...
well... cabbage soup... base?
a decent polish / jewish chicken broth...
most of the chicken goes into a ***...
except the *******: you make a *******
roulade with that...
and proper potato bakes...
potato bakes like Heston Blumethal
boils a soft egg...
tatties in cold water... until they start boiling...
then you hunch over them...
boil them for a decent fiver...
turn off the heat...
again... hunch over them...
like an inquistive condor waitig for
the water to stop bubbling...
asking the question: are we all ready...
for the oven? yes, my toy soldiers,
are we, ready?

apparently they taste like christmas
tatties in waistcoats!
my my... what a lovely affair!
cabbage soup? you really need a complete
lack of imagination and a work-around
using root veg...
the european way...
but what is preferred is ensuring
you make a cabbage soup like...
a slav treats a cabbage like a frenchman treats
an onion: you suffocate it...
an hour minimum...
until the crass ******* boils out...
and you're left with...
a sweetness... and softness...
bay leaf all-spice (english spice) included...
some kiełbasa (etymology?
root... kieł- derived from the plural?
kły... canines... suffix -basa?
baza - base... canine-base...
something that requires an understanding
that elevates the dog, "debases" the man...
no quran reader will understand this:
for lack of a better word: shaming food...

where would pakistani cuisine be...
without the pantheon of hindu spices?!
i'll eat like a dog and in so doing:
live a tier above a king...
i still find it highly unimaginative...
to call one fruit "forbidden"
and one meat: "impure"...
whatever Gabriel spoke to Muhammad...
never really explained crab meat...
crab meat crab meat...
the Maldive muslims eat crab meat...
what's crab meat again:
when it concentrates a comparison
with ol' porky porky? scavenger of the seas...
what's with the muslim beef on pork?
and god was critical...
of his perfected animal worthy of
consumption... looks pretty silly from
Beijing... so Beijing is ensuring that Muslims
"look silly"... well... "live"... silly...
so god was so... this that and the other...
then he lent his "all knowing wisdom" and said...
no... this one animal... which you can...
butcher and make use of...
all that's missing is the oink and the hoofs!
or whatever it was: i can't eat the oink,
the grunt remain's the bacon's owner...
and perhaps the "hoofs"...
but such a pristine animal...
tapeworms come... much larger in size...
from aquatic flesh... so...
tic-toc... tic-toc... pull a sly porky on me or...
Gabriel my ***...

the Pwophet sez!
much easier these days: to, "get away" with "it"...
camel jockeys turned oil barons...
yachts... whizzed-up-*******-white-****-****...
and never... the odd-ball from
that long extended lineage of the family
living with a cuddles *****, soft toys...
east of Beirut...
that pencil girth's woe explosion in the sky...
"built" by people...
who employ slave Bangladeshis for
a sunday's worth of sabbath cricket in the desert...
i thought that deserts were only good
for waiting for qurans and dinosaur blood
and myopia and... the odd dehydration
hallucinations?!

i'll eat some sushi to sober up before
i accompany my mother: circa 60 getting
a hip replacement surgery done on her...
i'll sober up: but first things first:
spew...

mind you... below you will find some
ancients inscriptions...
i had to wonder: if the precursor text
of the anglo-sphere people...
the germans and "celts" of the british isles...
the welsh... the scandinavians...
was bound to runes...
before the latin men came...
what did "we", the slavs, use?

before the greeks allowed us entry into
the realm of mediating the otherwise:
quasi-fathomable?
cyrillic is what came: AFTER...
but there was a prior...
i'm no longer interested in the prior...
no more than i am interested in greek...
i once slurred russian cyrillic
for not having any diacritical markers...
i knew they had them...
but that they were... crude...
for lack of a better word...

how does that theory sound?
the: ex Africae omnis est Africanus...
sorry... what?!
giving my scrutiny of phonetic encoding...
am i closer to speak...
or thinking, and if not thinking,
then, reading?!
by the looks of it...
i devolved from encoding in
chinese... perhaps not so much:
sanskrit... but i most certainly suffered
moving across Siberia: obviously: not "i"...

mind you: i've looked at "it" and thought...
me, reproduce? add a stranger to the equation
of my family? i'm just happy to end
the libeage... thank god i don't have
some inheritence complex abounding...
no expectation, no "legacy" akin
to a surname like Rhodes (circa NY)...
i was born with one ****** surname,
which changed... i'll die with another ******
surname: that never made it to a status
of Eshlert... nonetheless! i'll leave...
like a ******* Einstein of an acronym:
E = MC... good for me! bravo ty! bravo ja!

beside the egyptian hieroglyphs...
i'm yet to read something...
from... Congo... perhaps i'm just too ignorant...
or the -igger shade was just too much
that it... grabbed my attention and
i forgot that the victim olympics didn't
happen every 4 years...
but every... whimsical time-span of...
a quarter of the length of a fortnite...

whatever: all out of africa implies...
i'm writing in a devolved chinese...
frozen bits across the siberian fickle desert...
next stopover? Novosibirsk!
no need for pyramids in Novosibirsk...
no "awe" to be found...
when you're toe-dead numb from
frost bite.... is there?!

my letters are a sieve... they allow meaning
through like hands praying to cusp water!
it's, the, reality...
you have ****-wit socialists on one side...
and then... this hyper-inflated
darwinism is all historism on the other...
middle ground, people!
"democracy"! i stand stand both the marxism...
or the darwinism... but arguments failed...
or? we can have the extreme of both ends
of the argument! enough of reading
Pasternak will teach you...
hey... shhh shhh... the collective can
congregate any minute now...
they don't need that many intelligent people
to rally them...
what your, "your" side needs, though?
if enough brass people: stupid enough
to entertain, to lulluby...
em... that's now much to "go on"... is it?
the intelligent with pour gasoline
on a fire...
the entertainers will simply pour
cold milk into a saucepan that contains
milk you're warming to...
melt some butter some honey and an egg yolk
to self-remedy: devoid of big pharma influences...
a witches' brew for a cold and soar throat...

side note: do i "worry" about not having children?
if i lived on the Faroe islands,
Greeland, Iceland, Norway -
i most probably would probably mind...
small town mentality: enlarged...
then again: my family, "my" and "family"
is not exactly accomodating...
why am i not spending time with my grandparents?
at least one side... the "patriarchal" side
drops off: accomodating the madonna anyways...
a sister (my mother) and a brother (my uncle)
are waging a war...
this... "eastender" soap opera is...
i don't have the finances to grativate away
from it...
enter children? and they'd be more ******
up than i already am with my libido
and no outlet... i've stopped seeing prostitutes:
no because i felt "bad":
that one time we only pretended to be
leeching / kissing oysters just because
i forgot to trim my ***** hair:
like some western feminist argument
about the exploitation of romanian women "matters"...
when... the labourer drones of men
of building sites... coming in to work...
hangover... might perhaps... stop...
fuelling the english lush economy...
i didn't want to have children because:
family-wise? things, "things" are messy...
and there's no magic carpet to get me out
of here... not when the last surviving remnant
of a past... i.e. my grandmother,
talks to my dementia riddled grandfather
with the words...
and he stresses them: you no good...
skurwysyn!
elaborate? sure! z-kurwy-syn...
from-a-*****-son..
my grandfather's mother...
well... let's put it in facts...
my grandfather is an illegitimate (
oh **** me, i spelled that right, drunk)
son... his mamma then married...
the father of this illegitimate child...
was a polyglot... spoke 7 languages...
emigrated to the U.S. of A...
remarried, fostered some shards of glass...
and sent his last postcard...
from Niagara Falls... before jumping
into the kamikazee sun...
oh my family is perfect...
then this mother of his...
had two children with a man...
who would beat my grandfather...
which is why he became a "pioneer"
coal-miner aged 15 or 14 or 16...
then this one kid ended up being
fostered... then this "watermelon" of a kid
(nickname) came out...
from a love affair... and when the "*****" died...
his quasi-foster father lived with him...
and in this custard: he...
the father semi-god-know's what...
abused the old man for putting up with
him as a love-child: in wedlock...
and... well thank god there was
no epitaph to begin an end with...

me and children? i am gracious,
i am kind... i don't want them to inherit this
history... which is worse than
a history of germany... at least those *******
had the nazis... which is worthwhile
in terms of exploiting them via video games
as those: evilz badz guyz!

i always think: the sooner i'm dead -
the more chances i have
to either dream... or breathe...
currently i quasi the former and accept
the reality of the latter...
but me and children? my, own, brood?
em... for some capitalistic driven darwinism
pressure ploy of narrative?
taxes and retirement plans for
the western: placebo: aged?
grand'm'ah and gwand'p'ah not fit under
the same roof... set them on the butcher's
path toward the "shop" of wrinkle
and: pristine effortless economic
endeavor... the pig's the lot...
economic meat and... about as barren as a dinner
plate scooped up for examination
once a pauper sat before it to supper...
ingenious! if only, if only we were all born
into a Charlie ******* Dickens' lot of life!
then, only then, we could, we could
perhaps, perhaps: write about it!

i have seen how people have lived their lives...
how... they had wish to write about it...
which always involved a lot of other people -
movie scripts written by directors
and not... actual manuscripts of scripters...
they would write... but then:
started to gag from **** at the mere of thought
of being: brutal, honest, honing...

people either write an honest autobiography,
they ghost it: have someone write a biography,
they write an autobiography that's
designated as: tabloid...
but most importantly... they forget...
a "Moscow"...
when i was in Moscow... i felt like i was
in London for the very first time...
a last time...

i did mention that i didn't envy the russian
diacritical approach...
the odd: miss and "there"...
but no... i didn't envy them...
to me there was no russian orthography...
there is an orthography: which you mind
above any metaphysical discussion...
when, and only when... aesthetics comes
into play...
i.e. rz = ż and ó = u and ch (cerp i ha) = h (samo ha)
this is how orthography is born...
sorry... i'm too "busy" dealing with
orthographic ******* to even mind
your "metaphysics" or a death of (it): interim...

as i stood at the feet of the tower of babel...
i started to su doku the pieces that
pleased my eyes... and the pieces...
left in leftover arabic squiggles of
the remnants of the 20th century...
and the new emergence of environmental
beijing free-of-syndromes to spawn
the 21st... or...
the child of a one-child-state-policy
without a Beijing... only a gradual evaluation
of... concerns for...
not giving birth to yet another ****-wit
of the world's counter to: another
****** of a gullible persuasion...
given that law is blind...
he must have been born: deaf!

- you didn't see me coming;
i didn't even see you leave... -

since the greek letters i tend to most "forget"
are:
- gamma lower-case (γ) because
of the upper-case upsilon (Υ)
- lower-case zeta (ζ) becaue
of the lower-case "11" (ξ)
- eta, lower-case (η) is no real grief
with lower-case EPSILON (ε)
until... you enter the cyrillic
"debate" of е and э...
- lower-case NU (ν) and lower-case
UPSILON (υ)
- Ξ (Θ, Φ) i.e.: XI, PSI, CHI, PHI...
return: that first 'un' is an ale'ks...
alex... but it's not an X in the way that
CHI expresses itself in CHurCH...
lay-teΞ...
- then again... greek orthography begins
in SIGMA... those... quasi-germans...
those remnants of the northern / teutonic
crusade... those Pruσσianς...
or... Prußianς...
the greek F and the greek "F"...
key into a keyhole: Φ...
key turning in a keyhole: Θ...
the iota of four uses... Θ, Φ, Ξ... Ψ...

but that's only the greek... i will not touch
on the glagolitic... until, barely skimming
the draft months earlier...
until i come with my own diacritical markers
and show you: how i was wrong...
yes... the russians do use these markers...
but they, mostly... do not "accent" them...

because i'm no Ezra Pound i didn't have
to imagine going as far back
as the Taoist ideogram...
because i remained bound to the anchor
of europe and...
i really didn't find anything of worth
in africa encoding: silence into their
verbiage with anything:
beside the odd spell of hieroglyphs...
so? i am not an Idaho man...
or whatever mid-western miss-western
******* the genius came from...

i don't have an ideogram:
i have a synonym... the sound is exactly
the same... but Charon 'ave their eyes!
mind you...
ądam and ęwa are off limits...
as is: ł... then again: given that i write in english...
em... "yes, and no"...

but here's my rubric... a rubric implies:
i will not narrate this crap:

don't get me started on the russian variations
of Y... i once said... because the greeks had
names for their letters... and the romans didn't...
well... in western slavic: Y "why, I" has a name:
e'GREK... iGrek... e and i are interchanged
between the western slavs and the islanders...
but the russians?
let me Shakespeare that for you:
pre-scriptum - don't ask me...
how oh how a german umlaut infiltrated
the alphabet: i blame catherine the great...
you have...

е (ye)
ё (yo)
й (-y-) - which acts like a "ȷUDAS"
ы (ý) - alt. to? ıGREK
ю (yu)
я (ya)

all that's missing is a: иы variation?!
let me check my pentagram of vowels...
e, o... u, a... oh right... IO-T'AH-T'AH-T'AH...
sinking the ******* POTEMPKIN!

it's for the best: i'm entrenched in two languages...
which makes me "schizophrenic" /
bilingual... ergo? i have to write in at least:
four... pepper in some latin etc.....
and modern slang? i need that...
and some german... and perhaps a dash
of Gaelic... and some scandi-navigational
pseudo-romancing the rosetta stone...

the rest is quiet "simple"...
a french-atypical acute... because there's no gr'ah-v'eh!
grave ole...
and a dot... like the dot used for no real purpose
in english...

i.e. ь involves the acute...
while the ъ involes the "horde" symbol...
either the dot above the Z in ż or the caron
above the R: ř...
alternative interpretations invoke
even more: 'hide and seek" mechanisms
of the russian Y...
  объект: interJEct with an obJEct...
thus? there just seem to be gradations
of hiding a why (y) with its added vowel...
and its mutant й... crescent mongol moon...
and all the rest of "it"...
since when you "borrow": yew borrow...
you get something along the lines
of: e.g.:

ć.        ць: c.f. surnames ending with -CKI
ń.       нь
ó.      "u" or? Loonin...
ś.        cь
ź.        зь
dz.     ž (dzik - boar - the wild adjective is a tautology)    
ż.      ř       rz   (зъ) or? ж...
ł.       woad... łagodny (he - gentle)
                        łagodna (she - gentle)
š.      sz.      ш             (sh)
č.      cz.      ч               (ch... you're not foreign
to graphemes... mr. Æ ms. Œ...
you simply haven't seen it applied
to consonants... only vowels!)
щ     šč     (szczypta - pinch -
a germanic, saxon "ch" is a cz...
or a caron above the C...
ch' ch'.... akin to the caron above the S...
sh' sh'... so far away from "god": YHWH...
yet so close, so, close!)
ha ha... a "dangling bit"...
and i thought the russians weren't
good at hiding "things"... from ш to щ
you have hidden: a caron a "c"...
a ****'s CHeap... in a dangling "left-over"...
of an otherwise caron S... heap of SH SH ****...

in terms of the cerp and ha and samo ha?
the greek χ (chi) comes into play...
but not like a cheeze...
more like a vowel-catcher breath...
eerie as ****... a HA HA with...
cHA cHA! i.e. like the surds you allow
hindu words access to: gnostic -
'nostic... or... knife... i.e. 'nife...

it's no surprise for me, now...
out of all the black caribbean kids,
the indian and pakistani,
the africans... i was one of the first
to: come out swinging from under
the iron curtain:
distrust levels? high... near almighty...
not enough "japanese" in me
to squander a late debt from
Hiroshima or some other etc.

in some remote original draft...

as ever, i drink, and am a nobody, but then i find myself inclined to look upon the god of gods: whatever remains of worth for the phonetic encoding... whether latin, greek, rune, cyrillic, or ⰒⰑⰃⰀⰐ ⰒⰉⰔⰏ (another googlewhack)... the glagolitic phonetic encoding... sure, first they'll ban the runes in sweden, before realißing that... there's another alphabet... the glagolith...
                  Ⱉ = Ω, given Ѡ = ω...
         this alphabet has been suppressed, long enough!
to be honest? i've never seen a more beautiful letter,
anywhere, other than in the glatolith...
     Ⰿ = M = ᛗ...
                      maybe that's why i like my given names
so much...
                            ⰏⰀⰕⰅⰖⰞ
                 i too! i too have a past!
             i don't need to peer into pseudo-arab ***
the quran religiosity of hieroglyphs
of the northern africans, camel jockeys!
                             there's, oh there's so much
more at stake than the runes...
                what of the Kiev Rus vikings?
this, this is their language:
                ⰕⰑ          "ⰏⰑⰆⰅ"          (może = maybe)    
(to = this)
                                                   (ⰜⰀ = trzeba, trza /
                                                            tsa)­
            ⰕⰔⰑ (tsa)           ⰃⰀ (ga)     ⰂⰀⰓⰉ (vari)
               (gadać = converse... gavari)

    Ⰴ (d)                ⰆⰫⰕ (żyt = fathoming life)

                             ⰆⰫⰕ (worthwile noting:
this is out lot of, a, life)...

      ⰛⰫⰛⰍⰀ (szyszka = cone, of the ᚦᛁᚱ /
                                     ⰡⰑⰄⰟⰀ - fir /
                              jodła tree)

see, i can't solve crossword puzzles...
      i don't know where i would begin,
fathoming this sort of "plaything" thesaurus...
i can play a solitaire mahjong,
i can solve you a su doku puzzle
without wanting to compensate myself
by competing...
                  
   but i do know...
                    what conjured the atom,
the letter?
  what conjured the atom, the letter,
and subsequently, the alphabet?
        noun...
                  the cipher conceptualißation
of making a name, smaller,
so small, in fact...
that letter emerged, and names were
no longer indicative...
of a meaning...
  so much so, that units were
formed, fathomed...
and when merely giving names
to these units, akin to the greeks,
alpha...
        which had to become a-lpha...
and beta had to become b-eta...
          well... only thanks to the latin men...
they became songs...
sing-alongs...
   very much thanks for the H vowel
catcher of the hebrew god...
ah... said the castrato...
  b'eeh sang the castrato...
           em...
  obviously the devil managed to keep
some of the letters...
z'ed...
                 it's still bewildering...
how the latin men "reinterpreted"
the northern runes...
   as the greek men "reinterpreted"
the north eastern glagolitic script...
and to think! to think!
    Ⱃ = R = ρ = rho...
         but what happened, "elsewhere"?
ᚱ = R... but... but... where's the trill?
R, as a letter, looks like it's about
to hide a leg... and start rolling...
ripping apart all other onomatopeias
associated with the rattle of a rattlesnake,
or the sound it could make,
to associate itself with the sound
of water boiling... where did that "go"?
with the french hark "innovation",
and the english tongue...
being bitten and left numb by
a tarantula?!
                      
  point being... i never imagined myself
much of an archeologist...
i always found:
  if you state your "necessary" freedom
to speak?
you're a tongue inside one cranium,
at a particular time, in a universal space...
but, like kierkegaard,
you care more about a freedom to think?
i'm "here", i'm "there", i'm "i'm"
like heidegger might state...
                  using this very modern
language that's english...
          but then sliding back into...
an obscure region of history...
      in two places at once...
        at a universal moment in time,
in a particular space...
                   talking exhausts me,
whenever i start speaking for more than
ten minutes,
there is a cotton mouth infestation,
my tongue turns into a serpent about
to shed a layer of its skin,
and, if i'm lucky,
i will not swollow the tongue...

                    and why wouldn't the runes
be more protected, but currently under
siege -
             both the latin text and the greek
text (respectively),
had the ambition of performing an
x-ray on the runes and the glagolitic texts,
treating them as pseudo-hieroglyphics...

but they found similarities,
   which made this foreign phonetic
encoding systems relateable...

ᚠ = F
                ᚢ = U         (copernican "up-side-down")
ᚨ = A (strange sort of arithmetic, / \
                                              )
               ­ ᚱ = R (d'uh)
   ᚺ = H...
           ᛁ = I
               ᛋ = s
                ᛏ = t (what's with the "bending knee",
so much for the supposed: "arrow"),
               ᛒ = B...
           ᛖ = Σ = E...
                   ᛗ = M...
                   ᛚ = L...
                  ᛟ = o - crude version of circle...

so? the latin men had an easier way to
fathom the runes, and ingest them
into the x-ray vision of post-latin...
   the greeks with the glagolitic script?
much harder...

         Ⱂ = Π = P = ρ (rho)
                 Ⰰ = A = ᛉ = Z...
             Ⱇ = φ = ᚦ = θ...
                             Ѡ = ω...
                Ⱑ = A...
                          Ⱔ = ε....
                                            Ⱚ = θ...

but i agree... you couldn't get "our"
peoples to where we are now,
with these pseudo-hieroglyphics...
   after all: Ⰿ (M) is a beautiful letter...
in glagolitic terms...
          but... it's too complicated for us,
at this moment in time...
it might have had all the necessary
practicality in its necessary time...
that it was allocated to...
but... given people these days
are looking at X-|ɔ\
                              /
\ /_ / ?
                            how ******* hard must
it have been, when,
the phonetic encoding,
was as hard as it, to now, us,
it seems?!
                   so... whatever is happening
in sweden, right now?
       i'm not bemaoning it,
   i have a tattoo... it reads: Sienkiewicz...
the swedish deluge of 1626–29... a.d.,
          **** it, ban the runes...
i've "just" discovered the gagolitic phonetic
encoding, the sort of **** that
st. cyril and methodius had to work with,
and it wasn't as easy as translating /
incorporating the runes...

                     oh sure, i'm waiting...
                 first they ban the runes...
   then they'll have to learn something akin
to the glagolitic script...
             returning back to their x-ray
latin lettering...
                       i still can't believe that
james joyce got away with writing finnegans
wake... without ever employing a single
diacritical marker...
spewing out... what became the modern
english grafitti spreschen...
   e.g.: lolz...
                              und: L8ER...
it's like: the worst of the worst of what
already is the worst in the form
of the h'american demands for acronyms.          

after watching an old couple walk
past me into the supermarket:
    or unlike the men climbing
           the matterhorn:
   which from postcards seems so
much more majestic in its formidable
shape than the goliath everest
    (from postcards) -
                 5 miles, a dark forest,
  and i can show you where english
druids chant: satanus in excelsior!
   and i thought i spoke bad english:
it's: in excelsis satanus...
       i would have approached them,
but then i was alone,
      and there was one idiot shouting
and about a crowd of twenty disciples:
you could hear the murmur
   adhering to the chant from a distance
of about 300 metres...
                    i only had beer on me,
no goat blood, no woad pigment...
                crash a party when they
were having a party in complete
darkness?
                     it's a good thing there was
a song change on my headphones
               and for a minute i picked it up...
wait a minute: i thought i owned
these woods, walking at night?
               ragnarök blood of Hvalba:
unfortunately the norse founded
kiev,
           so if they founded kiev,
                they must have past where
i made mark as: the land immune to
                                       the black death...
if i were an academic with a stipend,
   i'd write another boorish book on the matter
to attract moths...
          but the old couple, hand in hand,
shrinking but not exactly disappearing...
     in me the inherent conceptualisation
of a twin, like a limb missing,
  but with all my limbs intact...
              yet still a twin gleaming in my mind,
as the story i was told in my childhood
no echoes like a behemoth ghouling:
    they said to me:
   did you know that in this world there exists
a person that looks exactly like you?
         what? so i started looking,
      not leonardo, not brad,
                    can't compete -
            if i really am the stronger twin
                 who sent my twin to the plough
and the hearth... am i not to suddenly
    lick ash?
                  but the old couple:
   what a rarity to see, dwarfs,
                                  of former majestic
forms... elsewhere the single mother with
a baby in a buggy at 10 minutes to 11 during
the week, bewildered by reading
frozen foods labels...
           oh... about the supermarket...
grr... mein gott!
                    Surabhis! Surabhis everywhere!
the joy of walking into a supermarket
last, aisles as spacious as any king's
    lonely castle...
        but in the hours 12 in the afternoon
till about 5 in the afternoon?
        traffic jams!
                   zombified shoppers, women,
of course, children to boot...
                           how many times i might
have bumped into them...
      gaze lost, hazy eyed...
                 sometimes i had to walk down one
aisle, emerge from another, just to pass
  a woman standing fiddling with her
hair...
           the new meeting place, apparently,
but that's beside the point,
   the more i listen to radio,
  the more i learned that i'm far from
a music snob...
            take for example:
       free deejays's song
                            el amor es un party...
what? cuba not pretty any more?
              but there's a worthwhile observation
in there:
        only rich men have the chance
        to play a woman's game of "the chase"...
        only rich men get to "chase" women...
        the poor schmucks?
                          ****! have to live with them.  
****... i need to find that
    one exchange in ingmar bergman's
film wild strawberries:
            when the old man wakes from
a dream-memory in which he is
the ****** of a **** scene...
        where a woman is teasing a man
to the point, until he transcendes
                   a teasing woman,
                       and finds a Jezebel...
so upon waking...
                the "children" are picking
flowers in the rain...
                          and there's talk of
abortion...
       at this point it's gone beyond
castration...
                      the conversation invokes
the death-mask of man,
    or man as tomb, and woman as
the robber -
                         apparently once impregnated
man cannot ask for his ***** back,
and in some twisted way:
           and as much as i'd like to "cheat"
having found the screenplay online,
   i have the misfortune of owning the ****
movie...
        and how i like returning
to silent cinema, black & white, foreign,
with subtitles...
                     at this point,
because didn't place the subtitles: on top
of the screen, but at the bottom...
   well, **** me: am i looking for
Cindarella, because focusing back
on those faces means i seem them without
lips and merely eyes and noses,
   and perhaps a chance to spot
   a wriggling, morphed into an insect
st. peter's, if not van gogh's ear!
              or the lost "art" of handwriting...
Cinderella? my focus is so low from
      the action, that i might as well be
  watching, either a ballet, or a *******
riverdance!
             dr. isak borg (a)
marianne borg (b)
        dr. evald borg (d)

such a weird and heart-numbing thinking
went into writing this...
i have a history, a past:
regardless of having children and with
their existence: some sort of guarantee
for a future...
that i have a past, a history,
and it exists... outside of its current
written format,
that i can escape with or without having
children: that i would have probably
later ***** mentally...
having ingested all this third party
quasi-history propaganda
for the only history that's being
salvaged: the insect prone libido
of a status quo... well then...
let my "failure" be the patent for all future
success.
for everything worth some sushi glue? this isn't part of it.
Tessa F Aug 2013
An unimaginative girl in high heeled shoes
That pinched her toes like a metaphor
Of painful societal beauty
Once asked me a silly question:
"Why do you wear such horribly huge pants?"
Well my dear,
If I buy sweatpants big enough to swim in,
And I let them slip under my barefooted heels
To become a part of me,
I am the mermaid of my dreams.
Raj Arumugam Feb 2012
1
Recently prolific
Writing reactions

Yeah, not prolific producing babies
or sowing wild oats
Just this unimaginative, pedestrian activity:
Writing reactions
Still prolific at my age….


2
explicit?
No, no, no - me no explicit…
don’t have the ***** to be that
but everything is implicit
like if I write about some aspect of life
it’s all there:
the routine, ***, violence, and so on
isn’t everything implicit?

3
POETS
New and popular

OK...
how about the
POETS
New and Unpopular
?


4
OK, I like this guy or gal,
right?
and so I click on LIKE
and the next time I look at it
it says: LIKED
Hey, I still LIKE her!
Look, I still LIKE him!
And why can’t I click on LIKE on my own page?
What’s the matter, can’t I like myself?
Is that a strange notion –
Don’t you guys and gals like yourselves?
Just tongue-in-cheek...
Just for fun…site people don't get upset or worse *******, OK?
onlylovepoetry Sep 2023
The Smell of Honey,  Coffee and Apples and Messes of Words, but
No Love Poetry

<^>

my poetry suffers from a literately literacy,
the adjectivally of imagery wears away with
time and age eroding the imagination, when one’s
days are numbered, being serious is an natural
unpleasant hazardous haze, never in doubt

The morning meal of cooked oatmeal, steel cut,
laced with wildflower honey, slices of honey crisp
apples and Hawaiian coffee brewed,  
singes the
Tropical Storm Ophelia thrumming humidity
that overhangs the ugly grays of NYC sky-paths,

one tickles me awake with contradictory impulses:
sweet and sour,
a robust stimulative, competing with the smothering of
grayling clouded weather weariness of
48 hours of rainy continuity,
a spirit suffocate

you see!

give you myself, my environment, in précis,
unimaginative exactly as it occurs to me, sensually, yes,
but cannot shake my disappointment that no,
can’t combine visionary notions that spin your swivel
chair around, powered by your exclamations of
ooh, ahh, and little stabs of weeee punctuating
our shared atmosphere
and bring forth
only love poetry

but no mas,
the love poetry doesn’t comes to the fore,
the forehead stuffed with words best listed as
basic, observable, factual,
Miley Cyrus, accuses me of being jaded,
but not with accuracy, more straight jacketed,
way past that half-way point of no return,
turning back is not a listed menu option

love poetry
demands, requires and requests
envisioning, precursor to dreaming,
but I am choking on matters-of-fact,
questions of survivability,
that do not
shed love poetry words,
I
love exclaiming
to any and all within hailing distance,
my loving firmament, but the damp atmosphere
swallows my hopes and sounds, even though
still can smell the lingering nearness odor of honey and apple,
yet, other hints of memory beg to differ,
and I sadly and easy confess,

this is not a lovely poem…
- * -
Filomena Aug 2022
My feeling word is adjective.
My mood number is one to ten.
My goal was met, and now I get
To wonder when I'm free again.
I guess I'm unimaginative.
Psych ward poetry.
Set 3, poem 38.
Anais Vionet May 2022
My suitemate Sunny is from Nebraska. She’s 5’9,” and has cinnamon brown hair that’s half messy-bob, just long enough that she can twist it up with a pearl-studded comb, and half mohawk. She has the long, slanky elegance of someone who’s spent most of her 18 years outdoors.

She’s a cowgirl. There’s a well-worn sage-nova cowgirl hat hanging on her dorm wall and she has her own horse - a red-roan quarter-horse named Valentine - at home, of course. Her best friend growing up was a Sioux girl named Wachiwi who shared her love of barrel racing and lived on a nearby reservation.

Wachiwi was the first person Sunny came out to, at 10. Sunny was 13 when she came out to her family. “I like girls,” Sunny declared defiantly, out of the blue, one night after dinner, “not boys.” Her younger brother had snickered, her older brother rolled his head and said, “Oh, lord.” Her two little sisters seemed unconcerned. Her dad, after a moment’s thought, responded by asking her if she had taken the kitchen scraps out to the chickens yet.

Sunny grew up on a ranch and there was a rigid structure to her days. She would get up early and do ranch chores (muck out horse stalls, feed the chickens, gather eggs and set out hay) then study - but her first love was World of Warcraft.

Sunny was homeschooled and her stories of how that was accomplished are epic. For instance, they had three satellite internet services which she would have to switch between, throughout the day, like a gambler hoping to get lucky and every other Saturday they drove three hours to exchange books at the library. Whatever they did though, it worked. She’s unholy smart - like someone made a deal with the devil smart.

Sunny describes Nebraska as “basic, cliche and poor.”
“Wow,” Leong says, “you really paint a picture.”
“We all inhabited different worlds,” Sunny says, shruggingly, “Lisa’s from skyscraper clouds, Anais a palace, Leong a dystopian communist hellscape..”
“I wouldn’t say a palace,” I demur. “WHAT,” Leong screeches, throwing popcorn at Sunny.
“Stop!” Sunny says, raising both hands to ward-off further snack assaults.
“I just mean, if you were to go live in Nebraska - you’d have to go in on those terms - expecting something basic, unimaginative and poor, periodt.
“I couldn’t wait to excape.” she says, definitively, “I was thirsty.”

Everything about Sunny is deliberate, she looks you in the eye. Like a madwoman let out of the attic, she takes perverse joy in being fiercely blunt, raw and outspoken. She has a drive that can’t be mollified - she’s making her life over and you better not get in her way. The girl cracks me up - I could stand to be more like her.

Sunny’s joining my world this June for most of summer vacation. “Maybe you could show me Nebraska one day.” I say. “Maybe.. someday..” she says trailing off with a far off look, “but I wouldn’t do that to you, you’d go CrAzY in three days.”

“I’ll own that,” I say, wiping away fake tears.
.
BLT Marriam Webster word of the day challenge: Mollify: "to reduce in intensity."

Slang:
Slanky = both slinky and lanky
Periodt = an absolute period - the last word - end of discussion.
Excape = future tense of escape
Thirsty = desperate for something
Cliche = unimaginative
Raj Arumugam Sep 2010
I’m a stamp -
no, I didn’t say “I’m just a stamp”,
or “I’m but a stamp” -
but I am a stamp
a postage stamp, that is;
unique and proud, in my own class,
for I’ve carried queens and kings and emperors
(I still do)
and I carry Presidents and Poets and Rock Kings
and Pop Kings
and Musicians and Legends and Heroes
and Gods and Nations;
and I carry **** blondes
and old dames who’ve dedicated their lives to others

I’ve borne with no complaints
the weight of genius
and soldiers and founders of nations
and martyrs; and I do not discriminate
and with like gusto and color
I’ve carried tyrants and murderers and charlatans
and once-were-legends now the shamed;
and look, I can encompass the universe
and within the shapes formed by my perforations
I’ve held together flowers and birds
and all wonders of nature
I am each a poem, a work of art
I’m a stamp -
no, I didn’t say “I’m just a stamp”,
or “I’m but a stamp”
(What? You heard me the first time, did you?
Well, I’ll say it again for emphasis!) -
but I am a stamp in my own right, unique and proud -
though, I acknowledge,
the image of Royalty or Heroism or Greatness has
not saved me from various knocks and hard presses
and the ******* bin!
But then, so have mighty royal heads rolled!
but look, hee…heee….heee…
I can be absolutely adorable,
and I just love, love it when you lick me;
and often too
I’m a collector’s item
increasing in value, and even with artistic merit -
though no doubt, there are countless with no idea
of how so darling precious I am
which is I why
I say proudly again:
I’m a stamp
no, I didn’t say “I’m just a stamp”,
or “I’m but a stamp”
(And what? Why do I repeat myself?
Well, there are thousands of copies
of one issue, aren’t there?) -
but I am a stamp in my own right, unique and proud
and I’ve created worlds all of my own
with pen pals and commerce
and industries and clubs round me;
and I’m not alone, you know,
well-supported by relatives
like prepaid postal envelopes, post cards,
letter cards, aerogrammes
all of us served loyally
by unquestioning Gurkha-style postmen and women;
and I’ve brought hearts and minds together
and I do it in a day or days and or weeks
and if I feel like it, I even arrive decades later! –
and there’s nothing you can do about it!
And oh yes, I can see, you’re prone to neglecting me -
you ungrateful scoundrels! -
first replacing me with cold
Franking Machines,
and cheap, unimpressive, unimaginative franking marks
and with postage meters
imprinting an indicia;
and all of you now
deriding my world as snail pace
in your world of instant e-mails -
but I persist, and I still am of much use
for - listen carefully -
and I say proudly again:
I’m a stamp
no, I didn’t say “I’m just a stamp”,
or “I’m but a stamp” -
but I am a stamp in my own right, unique and proud;
and if you, once in a while,
want to show me your loyalty –
come to a local post office and lick my royal ****!
Raj Arumugam Oct 2010
since the first pop use of the phrase
window of opportunity
(was it Bush or Stargate SG-1?)
politicians big and small
corrupt and incorruptible
fallible and infallible
have all bombarded
the media – on radio, in their blogs
and personal sites
newspapers and journals and broadcasts
and through any speech
they get a chance to make
with that ready phrase:
window of opportunity

Oh, turn on the radio
as you drive maybe
and some glum Finance Minister whispers:
* …grab the window of opportunity…
read the papers and some plump Minister of Health says:
…we must grab this window of opportunity…

Oh, whole speeches in the English Language now
are bullet-ridden with that cliche
and of course the financial planners
and educators
and doctors and even unimaginative lovers
they have all jumped in
into this *window of opportunity

till I’m so irritated and angry now
that if I hear one more eminent personality say:
window of opportunity
Oh, the next time – just one more time –
if I hear anyone use that phrase
window of opportunity
I’m going to send in contract window cleaners
and they’ll grab the window-of-opportunity-user by the collar
and throw them out through the window
and clean the window after –
and I’ll assure you,
those contract window cleaners
will not miss that window of opportunity!
Micah Alex May 2013
Cold smiles,
Unholy lies,
Dark hearts,
Groping hands,
Perverse thoughts,

Practical words,
Invisible swords,
Heartless refutes,
Unimaginative rebukes,
Hypocritical beings,

These are the things,
That melt the snowflakes in the sun,
Trample sparrows yearning to soar,
Dampen embers smoldering within,
Poach the tiger cub learning to roar.

These are the things
That leave Little broken hearts,
Strewn on the road,
Next to twisted little minds,
Where jaded immature thoughts unload.
AD Letwixt Oct 2018
Laying in the lawn
On a boring day
Looking up at the plain blue
"How unimaginative"

I throw the little knife into the air
To see where it lands
Dreams of Sepia Oct 2015
In the "Warwick Arms".


There's a girl wearing fake fur

of yesteryear's youth, weighing

out sexiness in the number

of beers she can afford.

How much oblivion

an unimaginative mind can take

is equal to the power of

a beached whale

drawing it's last breath.

The Russian wipes his moustache

turns around & smirks

that she's somewhat

under-dressed for the long winter.



Going to Japan.



Pink rain:

I could walk through it,

sweet-wrapped.

And the rice-blank  past

would be ample weight in my hand.

Like that of roses, remembered.

In a Murakami bar,

octopi would reach out

& dangle questions.

As a thousand pair of eyes

ask me to give the lesson

no-one ever taught me.

That they alone know.

That only pink rain understands.
' The Warwick Arms' is a pub near me....the poem is a sketch of the time a Russian friend of ours came to stay with us for a few days & how we went there for a drink..

by 'Pink rain' in the second poem I mean Cherry Blossom, for which Japan is famous...& by Murakami  bar I guess I was thinking of Haruki Murakami, one of Japan's most famous novelists...
These are old poems from way back, written about four years ago...I never got to Japan & don't know if I'll ever go there now but who cares, at least I have a poem about it....
Megan May Jun 2018
They called me a temptress
Rolling the dessert cart out always makes people say the oddest thing
You’re a temptress
I always assumed they were talking about the desserts
The ones I’ve repeated so many times I can rattle them off from memory without the cart in front of me
I never thought they’d be talking about me
I am dessert

I am cake
Not chocolate, I’m not dark enough to be called by such an unimaginative and racist name
Cheesecake
White and pale because I’d never dare to tan without bottoms on
Light brown just around the edges because I can’t help if those bottoms happen to be a little cheeky
Cake for the way my *** looks in the leggings I wear nearly everyday
Cake because I know you’re watching when I tip myself into the freezer to scoop ice cream
Cake for the way the girls tap it as they go by
I am cheesecake

I have creme brûlée skin
Light until I lay out in the sun, under the broiler
Browned to perfection
Covered in darker spots where the heat was too intense, freckles dancing across my cheeks
I am a creme brûlée

I have a cobbler mouth
Pink, nearly red lips
A perfect circle right before I kiss
Sweet and supple like a raspberry
Tangy like a cranberry if I bite
(I have yet to find a boy that doesn’t enjoy that)
Words, sticky sweet, spill out like melted ice cream
I am a cobbler

I have key lime eyes
The centers lined with pumpkin
Sometimes they turn blueberry
It changes with the seasons
(The pies are seasonal too)
I have pie eyes

Maybe when they said temptress they were talking about me
Cake that could be called chocolate when it’s wrapped in black dress pants
Creme brûlée skin that’s all covered up but my face and my hands
But see, see my freckles
See how they cover every inch of me
Cobbler mouth asking if there’s anything else you may want
If you want something to drink with that
My voice dripping out two pitches higher, sticky sweet
Blueberry eyes, almost always, the blue of my shirt brings it out
Even if I’ve only seen that flavor served once
Maybe I am dessert

Dessert
The first thing that gets dropped
Always last choice
Those who say they’ll save room still start with a main course
Dessert
Only eaten if your main course didn’t fill you up, wasn’t satisfying enough for you
Only touched if your girlfriend or your last **** or your lonely aren’t satisfying enough for you
Dessert
If you’re full would you like one to go
Keep me in your pocket, save me for another day
I’ll wait, I don’t know how not to
Dessert

They always called me a temptress
I always assumed they were taking about the desserts
I am dessert
Maybe they were talking about me
I work in a steakhouse and the summertime makes people say the weirdest things. I absolutely hated being called a temptress and it happened about once a week.
Wk kortas Apr 2017
We’d known him, back in the day
At dear old Millard Fillmore Elementary,
As Three-Desks Tommy, highly imaginative monicker
Deriving from his decidedly unimaginative first name
And the fact that he, indeed, had three desks,
Each of them stuffed chock-full
With uncounted numbers of pencils and erasers,
Any number of homework papers
(Usually A’s and A-pluses,
Though there were the odd B’s and B-minuses as well,
As he was a bright, in fact inordinately bright, child,
But sometimes given to sloppiness and stray pencil marks
And a predilection for not reading the directions completely)
Eerily accurate renditions of dinosaurs,
Wildly inventive stories featuring rainbow-hued dragons,
Noble and voluble talking bovines,
And knights and knaves of every size, shape, and suzerain,
Stories which resided cheek-to-jowl with some bit of uneaten sandwich
Until such time it made its existence
Abundantly clear to the custodial staff.
We’d never stopped to think much about his miniature Maginot Line;
It was what Tommy did and had always done
For as long as we could remember,
Though there were some teachers and an assistant principal or two
Who thought the whole thing was permissive bordering on coddling
(His teacher was a veteran of the wars, and well-insulated by tenure,
But she had grown weary of over-glasses glares and snide asides
When Tommy’s name came up in the staff room,
A death by a thousand cuts and all that),
And one day, while moving one of his desks
To clear space for Simon Says,
It had caught on a sticky spot,
Overturning onto a soon-to-be-fractured toe.
When he came back to school, accompanied by an ungainly cast
And an equally ungainly pair of crutches, his teacher took him aside.
Tommy, she purred, Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.
The other kids all make due with one desk,
And I’m sure you can find a way to as well, don’t you, Tommy?

So Tommy embarked on a great cleansing of his little fiefdom,
Filling several garbage cans with his collected works,
(Math papers and mastodons, bologna and Brobdingnagians)
And afterward he’d kept himself to one standard desk,
Duly filing, returning, and circular-filing his paperwork
As the occasion demanded
(Though one time Murph Dunkirk
Asked Three-Desks if he minded downsizing;
Tommy just shrugged, and said Well, it’s better than a broken foot)
And maybe in his dreams he had a thousand desks,
A thousand tops to fling open,
A thousand repositories for light and legend
Or perhaps he never gave it so much as a second thought,
No way to know now, one supposes,
Though if anything out of the ordinary had come his way,
We would’ve probably heard.
I want this life to read like an intricate novel. I don’t want to keep sitting at a computer all day while the romance of life slips through my arthritic fingers. They are meant to write beautiful prose that flow over our souls and cover them with golden warmth.

Yet they are tippy-tappy typing away at exhausting, unimaginative emails with signatures like “warmest regards” to cover how calloused my heart has become.

Sitting in this comfortable space behind a giant screen where nothing can hurt me is crippling.  We were meant to embrace the love this earth holds us in. We are supposed to bathe in rivers, meet strangers in different cities, and learn to fall. My knees should have scrapes, my elbows bruised from stumbles I take on dirt roads and motorbikes.

While my bones are intact, my life is what is breaking.
Corporate America and climbing the ladder got me like.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
it became clear as day... i knew this was coming,
the day when i brushed aside all the science,
the dogma, and said nothing of a big bang
fancy, but to keep me inside it rather than,
outside of it: whatever it was that imploded...
if the **** thing didn't implode why all this
gesture two describe it as an explosion, and give way
to phenomena? they're not imploding into
singled out individuals...
   ah, **** this boring scientific crap,
the rubber-band of me learning chemistry at university
had to snap at some point... it had to...
i also decided that the term big bang is really
ugly... given humanity and the care for aesthetic,
whether inner or outer, the big bang has no
impetus to succumb to it if your mind is
even remotely interested in science,
     i'd call it the imploded onomatopoeia...
i can't write a cat's meow or a dog's bark or a crows
croak to perfection, words have
no ~ markings attached to them,
which shows you how shallow existentialism
is with its lack of symbols, only the ditto,
and that's never really explained, for what i've
read it's a stylistic inclusion akin to italics...
no existentialist expresses whether a dittoed word
is ambiguity, or whether it's a loan word,
like a Pole might loan the word weekened
and speak the foreign word in his native tongue:
as if we invented it...
  Poles do that, a lot... i mean: it's easier to loan
foreign words than create your own...
   i call this an T. Edison stagnation...
the moment you start loaning words,
is the moment you're left with about two famous
Poles in the history of mankind,
and even that's disputed, since the Germans
want Copernicus, and the French want Chopin...
you basically become unimaginative, not firm,
loose, bubbly, lard...
    that sort of language encoding can belong
among merchants, but look how the former
mechant of Mecca has become strict,
where's the lingua franco?
             i know it's english, dummy,
  but i mean: why use so many loan words in your
own ethnic tongue, so blatantly,
    try to tell an englishman to use
    the german word zeitgeist with as much
of a populist zeal as a Pole who incorporated
the english word weekend, it's not going to happen...
thankfully the english know they're of germanic
descent for the most part,
    and partly norse, and celt... and roman...
****! what a brothel, you get all kinds here,
anglo-slavs and afro-saxons to boot these days...
magic... the ******* 60s were true, after all.
  but it's the puritanism in me regarding language,
well, given that Poles have become almost
akin to Jews in Europe, given the history...
oh look, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth,
ah crap, look, it's gone, no, wait, it's up and running
once again... no wait... they joined the E.U.
when papa essex and mama normandy said:
we're out! dumb chocolatiers, it was bound to
be too sweet, too true... too pointless to continue...
faking what the Mayflower people did "across the pond".
and it's almost fun learning how
the central european commonwealth was based
on the fact that: only a foreign ruler can claim
a crown over the geography that once spanned
from the baltic to the black sea...
yeah, and i am ethnically bound to talk about it
without having to: i don't even know the polish
anthem, the english one? it's the easiest
in the world, done in under a minute...
     god save our gracious king,
something something... something something...
  when i became naturalised as a "citizen" i think
i sang it... no, wait... i didn't...
    just like i didn't accept the catholic bureucracy...
i should have a tetranoun / "grammaton" /
tetrakilogram name in the paperwork,
what, catholic and not baptised, and not chosing
another name for yourself at the ceremony
involving the purple bishop?
   well, that's the first joke i spotted with what i later
realised as the Hebrew divinity, and how
i wouldn't desecrate the principle...
       but it's not even about that!
     it could well be about the 2015 film
fathers and daughters, and how they say
novels take years to write, edit, i say: vulgarity
is necessary, as are conjunctions,
     and as is phlegm...
                               but it's not even about that,
the sunday times magazines...
the style magazine on purpose, the dating columns
are going off-print! i can't believe it!
         what am i going to be reading from that magazine
on a sunday?
   i did once say (keeping up with the goldfish,
scatter brain, short-memory span, therefore telegram
poetry, many punctuation marks,
disorientating, punctual, but disorientating,
a *******-base on purpose,
i don't think many people will like it; good):
it would be nice to see a journalistic sabbath,
yes, a media sabbath, after all Monday newspapers
are so thin! anorexic news... that's Monday,
people have been lazing too much on sunday,
actually reading every single page that a monday
newspaper, just makes no sense!

and yes, the very point of enforced interludes
is that you might find yourself in the scottish
highlands looking at a waterfall, for example
the above is an uninterrupted waterfall,
and then gaze into the void of a sea not too far away...
and looking at that sea, you can see the most
perfect interruption...
    the romance died when science explained
the mystery of hearing the sea in a seashell deep inland...
there should be taboo subjects, taboo topics that
are better explained by love,
not this omnipotent dissection method,
just saying...
   how philosophers will call it abstract
and a poet will call it metaphor...
   given that both are not equipped to the application
of any sort of reality, or dare i say a schism from
it, akin to calling the two approaches
a realism, or some quasi or pseudo sort.
i can call democracy for all its wants to be the most
perfect consolidation of man under the rule
of man, but then a tornado comes or a tsunami
and all of man's efforts to rule himself crumble
into disaster... and how rare to see it when
discussed in philosophical theory,
    democracy as an abstract, is also a metaphor,
ob-, prefix denoting away from:
and then the suffix -tract... well, i was thinking of
a road... the less trodden track...
        apparently it means an area...
                democracy as nothing but a cancerous growth,
it spreads to almost every cavity where people
are content with an alternative political establishment,
for they like the basis for the ***** that
made it to the egg and beat all the other ***** that
would otherwise make it into a tissue or into a ******...
thankfully metaphor, i.e.: something not literally
applicable has the potent of not being abstract,
abstract, i.e.: working from the heights of ideal
to the depths of an idea, that has to compete with
the many narratives that later allow the idea to resurface
as a lightbulb...
                    these two cruxes are very much akin,
philosophy says abstract! poetry says: metaphor.
keeping in mind, i took to poetry like a mozart to a piano,
i never actually intended to say these things,
i merely envisioned conducting a philharmonic orchestra
for deaf people...  oh sure, this wasn't supposed
to be a one-man show, a monologue,
i never intended to say these things...
i wrote these poems in mind of conducting an orchestra,
which is a useful method of creating an implosion,
which goes back to, that dread, the bing bang...
    ever hear a ******* bang in vacuum?
     i wrote these "poems" so that someone who sounds
like a violin might play the violin parts,
someone that sounds like a clarinet might play
the clarinet parts... and if sound has a colour,
it would be a ****** colour when encoded for the eyes to see,
akin to something being monochromatic,
therefore this mono-nausea...
  i write the same encoded sounds for someone
playing either violin, piano, clarinet or harp...
  let's also add in sax...
           but that couldn't make it onto the orchestral palette...
what a bollocking, either 4 beers and
the expected weak bladder or constipation...
it was never to be a soloist performance,
which is why it imploded,
      why or precisely how i was not writing this
for myself, for myself to speak these words...
  tad too empathetic concerning what's universally
human, i.e. a condition of some sort?
which is how i react when one of my favourite
columns from the journalistic columns gets the schtick...
and is out-grown...
               out-dated, who would have thought that
a dating column could allow two lonely hearts so much
space to later pull them apart...
     neither cosmo nor dolly have made it
     to a love brick, that sits firm at the base of the pyramid...
which is sad how the dating scene will go on,
and they will go on, dating...
monday shuffle, tuesday shuffle, wednesday shuffle
(catch the pop ref. point to a song, we all boogie
down with the groovy kids once in a while,
basically a music video that was actually a advert
for some sort of liquid, root beer? ginger beer?
i know, i know: i scratch your back, you scratch mine).

i might call this: what happens with interludes,
or quiet simply: interludes.

i was never into writing something akin to an Ikea
manual of putting up a cupboard,
Ikea has probably the best library for self-help,
a, b, c, d, e... a few screws, a few wooden bits,
and something resembling corkscrew...
the only self-help there is, i.e. put a cupboard together,
by yourself. is there any other self-help manual
that can beat the Ikea manuals? i don't think so.

and how happy can a man be, having lost
the ability to drink perfumes (i.e. whiskey) and turn to
miss стандарт, with such jovial missing or
never had expectations?
   i guess, quiet easily, it's there, a bottle,
with a little story on the label,
   once upon a time (in 1894 to be exact),
  dmitry mendeleev received a decree (do it
or i **** you, harasho?) from the tsar...
to create the imperial standard (i.e. triple filter,
akin to the imperial standard of measuring
in inches rather than in millimetres,
the French, who apparently took forever to create
the concept of 0 from O... eat a doughnut,
much easier)...
   and i never thought i'd say that ***** is more
appealing to my natural ingestion of
Dionysus' blood...
     the more i think of it, i do think that writing
can become akin to painting,
it just doesn't have to be rigid, scientific,
order-prone... it can reach the levels of chaos as
easily as it can become dull and a shopping list...
   many people can't see writing as painting
in the same way that language has many more
function of applicable needs in other profession...
read a poem to a surgeon during an operation,
he needs language as rigid as a mountain
that said: no avalanches are bound to me!
     the reason why novels take years to complete
is the over-rule of science in the humanities,
i don't understand why poetry has to be bred for a
scientific pragmatism, that it apparently does work,
akin to soap, or bleach...
          science can poke it's crazy head in every direction
it wants, usually the interchange of words:
                 bang ******* hole (b.b.b.b.) /
   howlin' wolf's backdoor man / **** -
but science has become a dog, barking up the wrong tree...
the money's are down... houston, we have a [problem!
they're down... they're walking upright,
they lost the joys of having a tail and swinging from
tree to tree, and if an abstract parasite akin to cancer
doesn't **** them... your argument will surely be the one
thing that will... eventually.
    
and i did mention runes, didn't i?
   well... if writing can be anything like painting,
it can only ingest ******* as foundation,
  no shapes, no cubism, no definite "things"
(for lack of a better name)...
        just spontaneity... and hazard, and chaos...
just like life evidently seems to be bound to
reveal itself as guarding against nothing...
well... i appreciate the runes...
not in an ****-Satanic cult sort of status,
i just appreciate them because the Slavs didn't leave
any original phonetic code...
     which is why Poland is still so ****** catholic,
minus the Pope? add the proper post-script to communism?
it might have been the next Russia with its oligrachs,
minus the gas pipes and all those resources
people boast about, but who weren't originally
bound to inherit, like Arabs and oil...
   you need practical nations using the resource,
western nations, overly-bureucratic nations that
make a man "do a job" licking envelopes and shooting
ink into fountain pens...
         just saying...
hard to be lazy, hard to be mystic, harder still being
a monk... wait and see how these peeps talk when
they retire... it's hard being lazy, "lazy"...
        now i see heidegger's concept of dasein
as the real problem of happening, how things necessarily
and subsequently, unnecessarily happen...
then i look the alien remnants of nomadic tribes of
the Amazon and realise: they're still here,
but nothing's happened.
or that's how i take a break from that german's ponderings,
and loosen into some sort of stroll...
       just about the right time,
when poetry stops talking about sounds,
and takes to complicating modern painting,
akin to working on complicating a square,
  the most famous to be worth complicating (rather
than contemplating) would be piet Mondrian...
   if you ever find the spare time:
i'll be in the space that tries to revive the runes
under no ******* ᛋᛋ...
to be honest, i'd like to refine several runes...
given that the non-diacritical latin is largely lost to
the virtual world...
what runes would i refine?
   ᚲ (k / c) at least make it larger, like <,
ᛃ (j), i'd probably just call is skew, i.e. /,
ᛝ would remain and ᛜ would be lost
to denote the grapheme ŋ (i.e. njae) -
and that's because i'm either itchy, or stitching up
a carpenter's worth of lack of cruve,
   like the arabic alphabet is curved twice-over
and the woman are clad in shadow and ninja and niqab...
just like runes once were, hiding curves,
or at least the men overly defensive of their woman...
once the latin curves were introduced...
well: there came the mini-skirt, and the mini-couper car.

who needs a big bang origin, when you can have all
of this? if i kept that much dynamite in my head
i'd be seen wearing hawaiian shirts short-sleaves
and drooling over porridge at breakfast...
        and my... when was it such a sin to drink
***** and listen to the blues?
Rockie Feb 2015
Not too long ago,
Facebook and Twitter and other Social Networks
All seemed a novelty
A truce amongst unimaginative
Teens and kids and adults too

Whatever happened
To romantic paper printed notes
The blotched ink that actually meant something

Now it is loveless postings
And fake marriages
And fake relationships

This is all thanks
To the brain-cell killing
'Media'
Well it's true, isn't it?
Anais Vionet May 2023
Grandmère = Grandmother

Peter and I are in Paris, we arrived this morning. We’re staying at my Grandmère’s Champs de Mars residence - near the Eiffel Tower.

One of my Grandmère’s oldest and dearest friends is a Catholic Bishop. When I was little, he was ‘Monsignor Jean-Marc’ but now he’s ‘Bishop Jean-Marc.’ He’s been around so much of my life, he’s almost part of the family. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that he has his own apartment somewhere in each of her houses.

Jean-Marc is old. I think that’s fair to say. He’s white haired and the kind of short that comes on slowly, with age. He’s a disciplined kind of thin and his deep wrinkles are tanned from years of gardening. His teeth, always visible in his salesmen’s smile, are as white as altar candles.

When I first glimpsed Jean-Marc from the hallway, he was sitting on a cream satin settee, in conversation with my Grandmère. I knew something was up because he was wearing his red trimmed cassock and red sash, instead of his usual black suit.

What I couldn’t see from the hall, was that the room was packed with matronly ladies, dressed in matronly dresses of glittering white, glittering beige, glittering yellow and glittering gold. Argh! I was wearing a white Polo tennis dress, Keds mini canvas sneakers and my hair was ponytailed. I wasn’t dressed for a social. I swiveled to give my Grandmère a sharp look, but she took that moment to be interested in the drapes.

As I’d come into the room, Jean-Marc stood and greeted me cordially saying, “AnnAAAas!” raising both hands up over his head as if he were channeling the pope. Ok, I thought to myself, this is happening. I offered my most innocent smile. “Bishop Jean-Marc,” I said, while performing an involuntary curtsy, conjured from somewhere deep in childhood reflex-memory.

I don’t like priests. Slam me, sue me, **** me. When I’m around a priest, I’m reminded that I’m a sinner and I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. It’s the worst kind of guilt for a Catholic, because we don’t earn any credit for it.

Opp! I just thought of Peter, so there’s lust, right on queue - that’s a sin. Unfortunately, Peter’s not here. He and Charles went on a chauffeured driving tour of Paris. Envy - there, another sin, I’m on the road to hell but I can’t seem to stop, one thought just follows the next. Where’s a priest when I need one? (to confess) Just kidding, there’s one right in front of me.

The bishop began asking me a string of unimaginative questions, like an old friend catching up. “How’ve you been? How's university? As he grilled me, slowly, like a steak in a smoker, the herd of matrons ambled slowly our way, closing in to listen in. It was a scene straight out of the walking dead. I wanted to escape but my Grandmère held me in place, with the full wattage of her proud smile.

Ordinary boredom is an un-experience and all you need to free yourself is a phone. High society boredom is one of Dante’s circles of hell, because you have to interact with strangers when you could be doing something fun instead. The gathering finally broke up about 7pm and I was free to go. I was starving, my throat hurt from talking (about myself) and I hadn’t heard from Peter. When I checked “find my,” it showed him there, somewhere. So I went in search.

Peter was in his (our) room, on his back near the edge of the bed, one shoe off and one shoe on. He was as still as a corpse but a soft snoring suggested he wasn’t dead. I leaned over him, his black hair was somehow more disheveled than usual and his lips, moist and slightly parted, looked invitingly ready to kiss. I didn’t do it though, that would have been asking for trouble. Instead, I smelled his breath, slowly and deeply. Cognac. Charles had gotten him drunk. How helpful.

Once I tucked Peter in, I went looking for Charles, only to find him shooting billiards with Jean-Marc. He looked none the worse for wear and the gleam in his eyes told me he knew what he was doing - avoiding me with the bishop.

As I prowled the room, trying to decide what to do, while picking up objects and weighing them as objects to be thrown, a server brought in a tray with three bowls of cassoulet,* which smelled incredible, my stomach growled, and I remembered I was starving.

Charles, sensing a shift in the mood, said, “He (Peter) needed to reset his body clock. He’s young, he’ll be as good as new in the morning.” I just laughed. Charles knew I’d come looking for him and he’d ordered me dinner. I can’t stay mad at Charles; he knows me too well.

The cassoulet was to die for.
We’ll start our vacation, for reals, in the morning.
BLT Marriam Webster word of the day challenge: Cordial: “in a politely pleasant and friendly way.”

Champs de Mars = “The field if Mars” It’s the name of the Park (the ‘Central Park’ of Paris) where the Eiffel Tower is (my grandmothers house is across from it).

*cassoulet = a gumbo made of white beans, pork, bacon, duck, goose and toulouse sausage in a tomato stock of garlic, onions, herbs, and goose fat. A dreamy French comfort food I haven’t had since last summer.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
symbols, some just say zodiac, with Gemini at my lowest ebb - ebb, funny word, unravelling nouns from the cauldron of onomatopoeias, say knock on wood precipitated into a privacy of owning a door - whereas the Irish and the Poles encoded dialogue (like in Ulysses) with hyphen for snappy convo; in a pub, Charlie and Harry spoke:
- pint's on me.
- aye, on you the one and no more.
- why not more on me?
- i won the lottery, i'm goonah buy half of Cork.
- so who's this Yorrick fella'h?
- apparently a resurrected maxim.
- travesty...
- indee- doodley oh.
which beckons the question why the un-imaginative encoding of sounds gave English narrators too much power... the supposed ditto / invert comma wasn't expression of approx., nuanced, why wasn't the interpretation that of nuance? we can all use the unit Sartre chose to nuance, instead of "ego" the ref. point of conduct ~ego, i.e. approximately me, living with my mother but nonetheless womanising... unimaginative narrator, speeding, never gave his characters a chance, "i went to the market today", he said; that's the narrator masquerading - call this a dubbing mechanism? i would... like i'd hope for the centimetres and miles and nanometres of pause differentiating a comma from a hyphen, a hyphen from a colon, a colon from a semi-colon... and a semi-colon from a fullstop (exampled a germanic word with missing hyphen not authorised by the Oxbridge dictionary of couture, disassembling a navy sweater and toad-green jeans)... i mean, **** me, give me the precision tactics to read without invoking an αsθmαtιc imitation of a sailor's last breath; are those dots above i and j really necessary? it just rained down y y y y y y y y y y on top of them, enzyme activity? yep, ιoτα; otherwise just inert *******; and no, it's not a language these days, English has been reduced to pixel graffiti.

well... mandrakes and sparrows
aren't exactly androgynous...
maybe a mascara advert went missing
along the way... maybe.
here the piano... here the broken
fingers of Liszt... you poker me,
it's worth the gamble...
well ontologically *sprechen
what
the hell is a natural appropriation
of waiting for water to boil,
or an egg to be poached in shell
for a runny yoke? me neither,
i'm as dumb as a doughnut concerning
such affairs... i said there's no androgynous
behavioural patterns in sparrow and mandrakes,
you choose you adaptability whenever you
choose to stress a chequered flag...
parasitically i'll march with telescope
ants and flies of what alienation did
to the food-chain - yeah, aliens with an
enlargement syndrome -
bathtub of hydrochloric acid -
i just imagine the newly beloved painting
unseen, a squid cleaving fat and muscles
off a skeleton in the same light
as seeing a ******* - artist or pervert?
i guess both go hand-in-hand;
the hyphen, equal parallel usage with the inverted
coma / well... it used to be known as a ditto
                                                           ­            "
                                                               ­        "
                                                               ­        "
but mind you, before Oxford accepts a german
sounding word compound it requires a hyphen
in english - pistachio shells and shrapnel -
yep, as the above - unravelling of fictive tactics
of the bothersome nature for the narrator not only
loßing the plot but also the characters;
hey, english is perfect, i can apply whatever stresses
of φoνo i want... it's stark naked Adam & Eve...
i can put a ballerina's leotard on this encoding,
and no one will truly mind.
Yenson Jan 2022
Call me dour and unimaginative
even say in foggy vistas
that I am numb and thick-skinned
but without mendacity
I duly hand on heart thus proclaim
I just cannot at all relate
to these croaky periphrastic fantasies
of weak disenchanted ghosts
who cursing their opaque transparency
in vacuous bland plasma
crave sojourn in howling and bawling
begging attention and validity
excusez moi mon petite les miserables
but your fantasies
neither resonates nor romanticize
in the sublime realities
of those who walk on solid terra firma
and despite ghostlore
do still see themselves in the dark
and know to keep things real
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
the people look like flowers at last, and i guess
what matters most is how well you walk through the fire*
worth the palette, and the eyes - it's the beef tongue honesty
as cited in the poem of the same name -
never mind the 1930s poem -
i too wish i could have written the 1980s
(Poland) - but the communist years
are marred and budding in China while
people bemoan the two years under Martial
Law - and queues, endless queues for
provisions, and stamps for rationed food,
and shops filled with empty shelves or
white vinegar (a childhood friend's mother
was rumoured to have committed suicide
by drinking white vinegar) -
in all honesty i guess before the borders opened
and products started pouring in we could
have claimed a happy childhood,
but for us back then it was the call of the wild -
and the fact that we were together as kids,
even though the steel plant was being undermined
for profit and people were either forced to
leave to somewhere else in the country or
abroad - a thriving beehive of a town reduced to
what became know as the pensioner town -
supermarkets sprouted like churches, the city
centre once a trading hot spot was now the bank
square - nothing but banks; growing up i used to
travel for summer holidays - a fit child i became
hooked on the coca cola dream - between 16 and 17
i lost 30 kilograms on my bike back home, doing
50 kilometres a day - once the fat kid at the back
of the class, now the pomegranate munching hippy -
but that didn't matter: aged 21... god... jealousy
is so horrible, it transcends the healthy competitive
streak of sports and capitalism - now, each waking
hour i wait for the evening so i can numb the pain
riddling my brain - it's like being perpetually nibbled
on my an electric chair - and i can't do anything about
the sizzling of blood on this organic sponge -
headphones sometimes provide an equilibrium
and i jack-in and the pain is reduced - but try talking
to someone when you can't hear them - god, jealousy
is so horrible - i remember times when i'd go with
the guy to Reagent's Park mosque and sit there on
the minimalist floor and just absorb this grand
poly-chromatic social experiment - born into a monochromatic
culture i was fond of the diversity - but times have
changed for the worse, and i'm proof of it -
as i already mentioned the other great schism (not
in religion but) in medicine - what insanity overcomes
them treating physical damage with metaphysical
promises of a chemical imbalance? they treat the brain
as some ******* chicken soup - thankfully i was well
aware of everything - but that's beside the point,
why i survived i attribute to what happened to Sisyphus -
i'm not going to be as bombastic as the original version
depicts Sisyphus, son of Atlas (both of them the boulder
men) - well, i don't see Sisyphus as an absurd hero
like Camus - i very much see him akin to Loki (the trickster),
but it's not about that - for me Sisyphus had a near-death
experience, and was condemned by the gods to
that boulder of his and the ***** and the rolling back
and forth as punishment for that Sisyphus had no insight
from his near-death experience - he didn't become a poet,
and he certainly didn't become a philosopher -
nor a ***, rebellious in the sense that what Sisyphus
did do is return to business as usual - he had no insight
into death, he didn't befriend it, he didn't akin to
Marcel Proust or Tristan Tzara gain "a new way of seeing";
not many people have near-death experiences in all
honesty - and from the myth as stated, few can return
with insight - most come back with cliches, the unimaginative
white light at the end of the tunnel -
Sisyphus was condemned to the boulder for his lack
of inspiration - then again, any madman talking about
the next world with promises is doing a handstand while
attempting to outperform someone running the hundred
metres - circus Olympics - what's keeping me motivated
is what others would call the Cartesian extension -
my brain can't craft a fluid cognitive narrative with ease
as it once was able to do - these are snippets of what reminds
me of the ease that the brain once hosted -
which contradictory if Descartes was about -
a thinking thing is un-extended - if that were true
he wouldn't have out-poured his thinking onto a blank
page - matter extends but does not think - unless of course
you get into a debate about god (i don't see the point
ascribing atheism all the perks - i'm also referring to an
impersonal entity, not a personal entity that might require
praying five times a day for personal gains and repressed
grievances - you know, god of the airy fairy and the casual
phrasing of the word that is usually censored by
Jews - g- -d - which i find as absurd as western censorship
of oath words). so coming back to this Descartes point,
it's true that physical corruption (damage) would qualify
me as a non-thinking entity, pure matter, and therefore
purely extending onto this digital pixel white -
but the counter argument is... there's a distinction between
thought and narrative - and given the casual standard
of philosophy is more akin to narration than abstraction
of either 2 + 2       in mathematics, or μ + ω
in phonetic encoding or whether ω could be encoded
to a more aesthetically pleasing macron-omicron (ō) -
because if we're going to follow Descartes prescription
(they are like doctors, those philosophers, or that's
how i treat them, every key idea they regurgitate out
from their predecessors - a priori - and is new
and challenging i treat it like i'd treat a prescription from
a doctor - Heidegger, for example, prescribed me
the equivalent of sleeping pills for my insomnia) we
don't have to necessarily accept it as the gold standard,
holy, a sword in a stone - but i'm not going to fall
for the rigidity of their vocabulary, the part where using
imagery would refer to a monkey pushing cubes
through a canvas of squares to the other side of something -
or that great table tennis match of philosophical
narration - how did something, nothing, everything,
anything
are categorised as pronouns akin to
i, you, me, he etc. - i don't like their concentration on
either nothing or the basic self - that always bothered me -
but i guess it adds to the fluidity of language -
now i'm lost in my own labyrinth - and there's
the Minotaur on my heels breathing pungent hot-snot
from his snout - which can only mean one thing -
a trap to get into fixations and the stability of words
as one-dimensional, non-deviating from a unitary meaning,
rigidity of the non-existence of synonyms -
basically burning the Thesaurus Rex - which also means
no oil for cooking or butter for bread, or anti-ageing
creams - if ever anyone wanted one-dimensional
words, rigid language, a stability of some sort,
safe ~chemistry experiments read from a primer and
never new, black is black, white is white -
well... but i guess there's a preference for such an
approach to language, rather than the antonym of
such use of it, with negations in politics, in jurisprudence,
lies and corruptions, nuances, games and injured
hearts;
            Sisyphus ibin Atlas was punished because after
a near-death experience he didn't come back with
any insight - he just returned to his day job, and didn't
gamble on something beautiful - however
scrambled eggs it looked like.
Poppy Perry Jun 2015
The dullest of backgrounds
In the unimaginative shape of cheap and cheapened unpainted wallpaper
Gives even this, the palest of pale faces, a colour
Unfortunately, a blue and purple vein occasioned twinge,
Does little to flatter smooth foreheads and tight jaws
Fortunately, boundless space and air thick with smothered apprehension
Give plentiful reflection potential for the last lazed rays that have wandered,
waning, through a harsh window open to drain the space more than fill it
Until, upon finding wet blue upon dry white
A frivolous rainbow flickers in the classic tear
On the perfect cheek between this smooth forehead and tightish jaw
Below the eye, one tiny, flickering, frivolous rainbow
For no one to see
Cry Sebastian Dec 2009
The voice once so full of promise has found a new favourite word:
generic.

Generic i love you,
generic i care.

Thoughtless and unimaginative.
Lacking soul,
lacking vision.
As exciting as watching paint dry.

I squeeze for a spark where once was a blaze,
and at close inspection i find:
generic, generic, generic.

Warm molten ice cream drips from her mouth as she drools on here generic branded t-shirt.

Id rather have her curse me than belittle me with thoughtless hollow words picked up in her cliche dictionary.
Raj Arumugam Oct 2010
and now, most dignified Gentlemen
and most cultured Ladies -
it is time to turn our attention
to loftier matters, to speak of the spirit
rather than of mundane concerns and
to be stuck in unimaginative and non-inspiring
habits;
and so we turn our attention to the spirits
to the spiritual
to such high matters
to things that lift us above time and our bodies
and such points in reality and frail flesh
that binds us and make little of us;
but the spirit, most sane Sirs,
elevates us;
the spirit, most elegant Ladies,
liberates us;
and so we begin
with bottle in hand, in deed
(look, every religion has its symbols);
and  through several drops of this holy water
(several gulps will hasten the magic and miracle)
we are  indeed hand in hand with
the Spirit of all spirits
for what matters it if you hold or invoke
gin, ***, tequila, ***** or whisky
whatever it is that one lifts
one is lifted by
and that One one lifts is the Grand Spirit…
and you see transformations occur,
the mind is released from the mundane and the pedestrian
and the ordinary;
and one may see light, there is a sense of lightness
and those who may be touched by the Grand Spirit
may actually levitate
and one has visions and ecstasies
all through the spirit,
most Spiritual Sirs
most Lofty Ladies…
and mock not this religion of spirits
for have not masses of humanity all through History
done the same in the name of religion?
Does not humanity do all of the same with
the Great Spirit they call God and
do not they too have visions and ecstasies
and feel the spirit move them and
are always aiming High?
Their senses and wits dulled
but their spirits going on high?
Drunk on high
with words, words, words...
And are they not in their true religion
moved by God and have such grand visions?
and will you then -
O ye vipers!
Ye hypocrites! -
mock the spirit
when you will  
sanction and approve and dance
in the midst of those who drink religion?
will you denigrate your brothers  
and sisters
in the spirit?
Oh, you who are drunk and revel in the name of God
and holy books and repeated words
will you judge those drunk in the name of the spirit
and radiant revelations  that come to them
when they are moved by the spirit?
Judge not, ye hypocrites!
Judge not, lest ye be judged!
And so we end this sermon in amicable spirit,
in unity, in spiritual oneness
between
those who drink of the high of religion
and those who drink of the spirit we have spoken of
Go ye forth hand in hand then
as siblings
for ye that worship in the name of religion
and ye that have ecstasy in your own holy bottled spirit
ye are but brothers and sisters
moved by the One Spirit…
Go ye forth together, go in ecstasy, go high…
Andrew Kerklaan Apr 2013
Upon this parchment I scribe a vow...

To never turn away even if it burns my eyes to look...

To go on with-out fear of failure and to cast all doubts aside...

A vow to be ignorant of this plague of ignorance!

I solemnly swear that I will spit in the face of prejudice indignity and deface the figure-heads of unimaginative creationism

...And I will not back down nor shall I be deterred from that which is inspired!

I shall embrace freedom to it's fullest extent and will die upon compromise of that which I have deemed sacred.

This much I swear!!

Until death strips me of my right!

I vow to be free.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
agreed, nietzsche hit the nail into a bullseye, the poles are the germanic equivalent of the french.*

i'm like athos: the best advice is
to never give  advice...
dumas was spot on
on that one,
most people give
advice so other
people can commit
the same mistakes
and seek counselling
to once again read a map
they're supposed to invent,
to stop them following in
someone's footsteps
to an unimaginative east
to only find a setting sun
will always end with a harrowing:
drug addicts do it better,
they don't have a conscience
about it, and the only advice
they give is: more more more!
******* advice is astrology -
wear a zebra or an aeries bow-tie
and you'll be fine... just fine...
picture perfect meringue marionette.
Ben Nicolls Jul 2011
You are absolutely undeniably
my favorite.

I love every bit of you,
the way you feel when I
run my hands down your back, and
the unique and subtle scent you carry.

I can't get enough of the way
you make me feel and the way
you make me think even after so
long and I can always predict what
you will say.

I treasure the comfort you give me
after a long day of dealing with
people so trite and unimaginative as you.

There are many like you
but there are none that are you.
You are without a doubt
my favorite book.
Viktoriia Jun 10
what hurts the most
is the unbearable duplicity of it all.
i wonder how long you were going to pretend
once you'd changed your mind,
once i'd become too difficult for you to adore;
i guess developing a personality
outside of your own thoughts
was a huge turn-off.
you must've hoped that love had done a better job
at clouding my judgement right before that last fight.
well, self-awareness truly is a double-edged sword;
i found myself but i lost
the last ounce of compassion
towards your ever so unimaginative lies.
now that it's time to reap the fruits of our labour
every bite gets stuck like a lump inside my throat.
but darling, just so you know,
what hurt me the most
was the unbearable duplicity of it all.

— The End —