You tell me that I am young
That life has merely licked me, not stung
That I do not understand, that I have not yet lived
Enough to grasp the substance

I have known disease
Slow tears, muted pleas
Pain that nothing could appease
I have known the smell of hospitals for summers
The beeping and slurping of machine in massive numbers

I have spoken to voiceless loved ones,
Loved ones with teethless mouths and twisted tongues
Distorted jaws and wheezing lungs.
We have spoken with little green charts
And broken hearts
From the inability to connect the mouth to the thoughts in the head
And I left without understanding,
What they had said
Because I eventually had to let it go
(I still don't know)

I have spent countless summer nights
In nature’s garb, floating silently in a river
So warm that my limbs, skimming the surface, didn't shiver
Under a clear sky, the stars like paradisiac lights
Without anyone ever finding out
About these wild and primal escapades

I've drank, I've smoked
I have burned my throat
With coarse lemon gin
Until I could no longer feel my skin.

I have been frightened
Yes I have felt fear, like a noose around my throat being tightened
Like a gruesome black crow, perched on my shoulder
I have often awoken affright at night,
Longing, praying, for the morning light
I have felt fear, wild, fierce and turbulent fear
More than anyone will everyone will ever know
By men, by life, by myself
Desolate under the sheets, like a forsaken toy
All by myself

I have seen Paris in the rain
Traveled the French countryside by train
I've woken up to New York window views
And seen New Orleans afternoons, filled with heat and blues.
I've swam the Mexican Baja waters, turquoise and clear
With snakes as sharp as spears

I have known humiliation
Causing my cheeks to turn carnation
A spoon, emptying my insides out
Like a gourd

I have loved
I have known the aching pain of a swelled heart
And the way it can tear you apart
I have gushed torrents upon my pillows and sleeves
Tears running down my chin like guilty thieves
From a lit-up house

I have known death, and grief
The meaning of "never"
Whimpering in the school bathroom
And cold, lonely nights

I have seen the works of Van Gogh, Mondrian, and Miro,
Modigliani, Cezanne, and Frida Kahlo
Of Monet, Gauguin, Matisse, Magritte, and Picasso
I have wandered through hallways of masterpieces
Holding tight to my grandmother's hand
And I have wept shamelessly for joy
Before Degas's La classe de danse

I have been diagnosed
I have undergone computer programs designed to shift my brain, to better it
To get me to be normal, to submit
I have had brain-altering medicine shoved down my throat,
Like stuffing a goose,
To make my brain run a little less loose
And I have submitted and gotten use to my brain being altered.

I have had kisses that were mere trifles
Frivolous, yet fierce and acute like shots from a rifle
Lips of mere flesh, not sweet godly nectar
And gazes that meant everything
That seemed to connect with an invisible yet indestructible string
Iris like distant galaxies and pupils twinkling like black jewels
Eyes that seemed enkindled by some ethereal fuel
Speaking of emotions far too secluded, cryptic and cluttered
To be worded and uttered

I know the way in which violence resides
Not in commotion, brusqueness, nor physical harm
But in silence
In the time that covers pain and secrets
In the slow impossibility of trust
In the way that some secrets become inconceivable to tell, time has so covered them in rust
In that dull, dismal ache
In all that is doomed to remain forever opaque.

I have read, for pleasure,
The works of Balzac, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Voltaire
Of Bobin, Gaude, and Baudelaire
Of Flaubert, Hemingway
and good old Bradbury, Ray
Émile Zola,  Primo Levi
Moliere, Rousseau, and Bukowski
I have read, and loved, and understood

I have known insomnia
The way a beach knows the tides
Sleepless nights of convulsive, feverish panic, of clutching my sides,
Of silent hysteria and salty terror.
I know what happens at night, when sweet slumber seems so far away
The worries and woes seem to multiply and swell in hopeless disarray
My lips grow pale, my eye grow sunken
As a time ticks by, tomorrow darkens




I have witnessed horror
In the form of a blue body bag
Being rolled out with a squeaking drag
By two yellow-vested men
With apologetic eyes
That seemed to say "Oh god
We're so sorry you had to see that
Please, please
Go home
And try to forget"

But you are right
I am still just a child
Naive, innocent, and pure
I have known nothing dark or obscure
I have not yet lived.

he would have discovered him
trying to change the water formula in his tears
he tried to exist/insist/resist
where no body was thinking
the man without moon
suspended in a terrorizing labyrinth of faces
His own
he was a method man
growing salt in his eyes like minefields
teaching it the taste of the earth
anxiety like mountains of fog eradicating crossroads
he wants to exist inside the body of the world
with the decency of negotiated desires
and the hands get lost in translation
truth is a black truffle
sweating and swearing
sensuous craters perhaps
he killed many singing birds
searching for imagination, his body
muted, renegotiated soon after birth
staying alive, denying the soul of zebras
He lacks verbs, some nouns
learning from the theory of absence
how the effortless U(n-conscious)
is a Poet that
rhymes the body with the mind
of the world

He summoned the shaman, the artists, the tango teacher
to the wake of his body
while learning how summer waves contribute to a theory of mind
his self white
white while forgetting Magritte,
a taxi for Chopin
or the whiteness of the cotton pickers
perhaps

repetition, that's a good technique, a form of
reiteration, emphasis, as you like to
move in the river of synonymousness -
i mean, plenty to choose from -
well it's a better technique than rhyming,
it's like Kaiser Karl Lagerfeld said
about Coco Chanel's legacy after she died
in 1971: 'people tend to forget, that,
once upon a time, Chanel was old hat.
it was only Parisian doctors' wives who
still wore it. nobody wanted it - it was hopeless.'
(oh i can be couture no problem,
the other side of me that's into galleries -
even though that never brought me much
luck with the ladies, Beelzebub ******* on my
face and i started to squeeze out maggots
ensuring my face was forever crater riddled
moon - yes, excess white blood cells).
that's the same with poetry, it can't be
love me doo d'ah mushy mushy candy-floss
longing crap - mate, i'm a bus ****** and
this bus is coming but it's already 20 minutes late...
and it's ******* cats, dogs, frogs... Norwegian
acid rain, my anorak is peeling like a snake
shedding its skin and you're rewriting the early
Beatles unleashed on the American public:
shaved, hair trimmed into mushroom bops
all that Rene Magritte **** 'love, love me do!'
forget it, it's not going to happen, rhyming is the last
resort, i prefer the chance rhyme, it sometimes
happens, and it's too cute when it happens randomly
rather than with premeditation;
you can also throw out all the other premeditation
of techniques that poetry is known for...
what's the point? and back concerning rhyming,
you really want your poetry to be discussed by
schoolchildren and an english teacher in between
grammar lessons
                                  rhyming schemes and all?
that's how it goes:
         her name was Dazie          (a)
         she was never lazy             (a)
         i wrote her a sonnet           (b)
         reclining on a car bonnet  (b)
                                                               that's how they
do anatomy on poetry, the forensic team will
be with you shortly, the only reason i can think of
and know of as to why people are abhorred by
poetry (it's a natural repellent, spray it on weeds
             and insects, a natural insecticide,
****, spray it everywhere) is, because people on
the academic level have scrutinised it, analysed it
to the extent that it's not even there, it gets you thinking:
so who the hell was paying attention to the mammoth
novels of Tolstoy? oh right... no one!
the forensics, the post-mortem of poetry,
it has literally been mummified - the brain came out
as porridge ****** out through the nose.
are you familiar with Tenacious D's one note song?
that's what rhyming is to me, ever hear it?
it's the -ing twang
                            it's the -ing echo echo echo echo echo...
halfwit variations, you're hitting the same note,
great if you're penetrating a girl and she's giving
you an Opera of Vowels... otherwise it ends up
in a schoolroom, with an english teacher
and the rhyming scheme of a sonnet is?
                          ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
or?
                                                              abracadabra.
personally though Tenacious D's song kiełbasa,
etymology:
                    kieł       (canine, in polish)
   -basa (i'm guessing: the base of)             -
it's a sausage                                based on canines,
kieł (insert a           w    for the         ł.. tongue tied, eh?)
is a reference to a canine, a sharp tooth anyway,
and with -basa             i just intuitively thought of how
a hebrew would write it (i.e. hiding vowels)
and therefore juggled in an      e                  for -base.
they do, even though hebrew has Aleph (א) it hides
the vowels: S VRYTHNG RDS LK S - or i might
just be bullshitting you.

Clean shaven, bowler-hatted, crisp-suited men
are spattered across the canvas,
       with stiffened spines,
              vertebrae militarily ordered,
Plunging toward the ground,
       not falling,
              plunging,
              leaden,
from a sky the color of a smokers’ lungs,
        gray and blue from lack of oxygen,
sputtering them out.
       They seem not to notice.


Blank-faced, easy-armed, composed,
they seem not to notice they are doomed
        to be piles of splintered bones
                webbed with sinew and lumps of skin,
Thinking as they head toward the ground,
         praying,
         “If I pretend it’s not happening,
         maybe I’ll be okay”
from the heartless pavement,
         gravity with the whole world behind it,
yanking them like teeth from the air.
         Only a few clenched fists betray their terror.


Or,
the

Choking, muted, and embittered city
could be letting them go,
          allowing them to evaporate
                 back to the sky where they belong,
Welcoming them home, that sky,
           not with violence,
                  welcoming,
                  gently,
to a sky where ennui is beautiful,
           star after star after star,
whispering that they are important, splendid, lovely.
           One can only hope.

it's not the case of irrationality with the usage of pronouns as a way of being assertive away from the existentialist dittoing of the pronouns; even if i utilise the pronoun to be a noun or a verb via dittoing, with the framework of an esp. exemplar "irrationality," i am still, after all, the speaker of the noun and verbs, and the keeper of them; i am not irrational to the extent that i ditto myself outside of other categorisations of words, since dittoing myself within the pronoun category opens the accusation that i use all other words with ambiguity while allowing no moral ambiguity into my actions - but there is a clear morality to the use of words as the worthwhile exchange of meaning, in newtonian sense in the least and foremost not going beyond the dropped stone or insinuation of passerby engagement into games - but clear crisp cut - silk scarf tagged twelve quid was sold on the haggle for ten quid - so that haggling wasn't an ambiguity, but the price of the scarf was! so how many sexualised insinuations have i heard with impromptu to no action?! too many! all of them declassified from furthering action because of too much innuendo and nuance of that famous disguised dialectics lost - known as the death of god. cartesian in existentialist terms, thinking presupposed as the notation via "i." thought no longer as an existential certainty... but because of the dittoing of pronouns... an... ambiguity! well it was originally an ambiguity, but why excess pausing to counter? the english are a nation of shopkeepers... yes... and the french are a bunch of nosy café patrons with rude lovers disguised as bartenders muscle aching to munch the next croissant in drag and feel sexed up gagging.

verum, ego scribere similis rumi*; scribbles and similitude -
worth an afghan worth of eyes in syria for an afghan girl
saying to her loved up something or other:
see it come back, god forbid you hear the calculative laugh
of augustus on the way back, just while europe resigns from involving
the remnant slavs like libyans or syrians or hebrews in the original format
of strength: let the hebrews deal with them
in their own vatican - we need to curb north africans
and the mid-middle-eastern olives
when taking over the northern peoples for economic harvests.
but then the madman laughed without ordinance and impunity -
he laughed augustus' rationalism into the grave of choking chock fudge brussels
with spare tonsils eating nothing but cauliflower and lard -
elsewhere in movie via ghent; or was it in bruges or
was it in brussels starring jean claude van damme?
i call it... writers went mad on excess phonetics never readied
or introduced - except with magritte wearing a diaper
rather than a full james bond when painting.
i heard it was a proper heist to keep the police numbers handy,
i had it all tanned in argumentation for hued brown in the nordic
special; oddly enough no nordic special sailed for a sinking of the vasa
with predestination - airport was nice - we argued then -
we're not a continent of north harmonicas with jokes
between mythological four lead clovers and oak real canada threesomes.
well i was a continent with croatian and scandinavian,
i'm not originally a mc donald continent - although that 'MADE IN CHINA'
helps to resolve all future wars with the silkworm beginning:
rodeo in the haven of horse's burp and fall of the cheap spain due to tourism -
old continental had corrida - new continent has rodeo -
somewhere between the ****** and maidens came oceans elves for a bet on
who could write a horse out from riding into a blunt metal clasp of stirrup eager sounds:
or a twenty aged colt sounding like an eighty year old nail wrinkled with rust hammered.
blunt metal won, horse gasped for air, the ***** was taken home with stitches,
the maiden was taken home with a groom in stitches also, although
stitches of old age prior asked for in her meringue dress to suit: wrinkles;
but hey! there's **** in between! who's the loser, the aviator or the aqua puncture of thought?
but still augustus laughed it off with nero on the waiting list of possible re-encounters;
israel received the southern cicero of the roman empire,
while the rekindled empire got the north-eastern and northern part of
the unexplored without saints travelling elsewhere,
and for that it got implosions, with the schengen approval reminded
to cloister the leftists eager to holiday in syria on unesco cruises in sand and sheep ****
of kept marble - for that cocktail party convo, and next day article in the new yorker;
shame on you for using children to ploy en masse morality of guilt
to later reproduce the hydra with so much racist cribbing
of a seahorse riddling perpetual dynamos
as to imagine the future cot rock-a-baby-jihadi saladin:
the fire is in his own house, runs with a
              flaming matchstick to his "neighbour's house"
to start the fire rather than trying to put the fire out in his own house.
honestly? sounds a bit binary in bangladeshi.

and would i ever get embroil myself in a morning of: coffee,
croissant and a newspaper? i find it strange how newspapers
are printed for workers - sold in the morning,
and read in the hazy hours before the mind
catches up with the body at noon
lead to nothing but village sentimentalism -
and dupe sensationalism -
they really know when to baptise them:
a few weeks into their lives (most never
object to confirmation, i, for one, started inquiring
about the Gnostic cults, and said: nah, you'll
alright without me) -
baptism is a bit like newspapers:
i really didn't ask for it... sorry, i was in diapers,
i knew that i'd be wearing diapers
if i went to my confirmation by the Bishop
of Chelmsford - imagine what a cardinal
could do to me... but that's what newspapers
are, they are written in reasonable comfort,
i don't mean the sort of journalism
akin to all the president's men -
that's valiant... i mean the opinions sections,
i read a newspaper and think of only one thing:
****! i threw away something i actually
need in the recycling pile of garbage...
so you go back to the bag and sift through it...
which is what it's all about:
newspapers pulverise the half-awake readers
on the tube... making newspapers free is also
a tactic... i read newspapers, about this time,
nearing midnight... i've spent the entire day
occupying myself with colours, squares and clouds,
i leave my desire to see phonetic encoding a - z
till last, when i can relax, and actually recycle
all the opinions of the day...
shamefully, others pick up a newspaper,
early in the morning, and just nod, agree, nod, agree,
pigeon on parade... makes it easier to earn
a few more disciples when half of them (if not all)
are still trying to remember a dream at 7 a.m.,
all the opinions sections are fabulous!
mental health matters... like **** it does:
you're saying a box inside that storage room that's
your brain aches like broken arm...
you go to a doctor, and he replies: it's all in your head...
well, d'uh, metaphysical health was always clumsy
with what became spaghetti entanglement
for philosophers - the one never translates into
another as honing in on, and synonymous -
but that's life... but the two were never supposed to
be at odd, or, quiet simply: parallel -
after all, thinking, if a limb or an *****,
is more than what the automation of the brain is:
receptor to nervous stimuli - if there's an *****
such as a mind, and it's verb optimum is sick...
it's like seeing the desperation of someone doing
cartwheels on a tightrope, while deciding a next
chess move playing someone down below,
and smoking a pipe - thought, in the end,
is a dilemma where to many verbs are associated with it:
it's so spatial in that it tries to encompass a near
exponential number of ? / hmm hiccups -
                              as it does encompassing a near exponential
number of ! / eureka hiccups -
the German Chancellor and the fourth cottage -
and the opinion: nacktarschuzdeckenwunsch
(the desire to cover their own naked backsides) -
ah, newspapers and the morning,
whoever reads a newspaper in the morning is a sheep...
who doesn't even thinks that comics didn't slowly evolve
to be comics? they are pristine Geminis -
i wouldn't read a newspaper in the morning,
because i know most of these articles are written in
the afternoon, notably the opinion sections,
by people donning kimonos, drinking wine
and smoking Magritte's phrasing of: not a pipe.
i can't treat them as trash either... i call them
midnight literature... after i've spent the day not
looking at phonetic encoding symbols,
i finally zoom in, revise my eyes and ease into a crescendo
of appreciating newspapers, for whatever they're worth,
which, according to the Thursday's edition of the times:
£1.40 - but reading newspapers in the morning
is horrid - too much world, too much care,
too much moral acting - too much conversation...
the world is too big, and i'm too small...
so i do what the writers of these articles read:
although i have a stronger solvent to read their preaching
parody of Mt. Sinai - but what i found, apart from that,
well... couldn't poetry steal something from
the journalistic medium? in the way art is appreciated
without critics? shouldn't poetry be the only medium
of art where other art mediums are appreciated?
for example, i find that when i'm hearing the clicking
of the keyboard, and there's a record in the background
i have a full meal in front of me,
i forgot how good tubeway army's album replicas
is... as a second course meal... nothing of the top 30
canape charts of nibbles of artistic output...
poetry can congratulate over mediums of art,
it can steal from what journalism encompasses -
namely the critical pieces of the journalistic anatomy -
art, doesn't necessarily have to be a matthew arnold
moment of as soon as i returned home, i pulled off
my coat, flung myself on the sofa, and wept the
bitterest, sweetest tears: after coming back from
a Liszt concert... really?
i think that ballet is supreme sadism and Bach
had wax in his ears... fame and the adoration of women?
too lazy... like drinking too much, and listening
to what i like: without adverts selling me car insurance
and German shampoo.
yes, i am bothered, i'm seeing something in England
that's worrying, something akin to a Marx & Engels'
study of Victorian England - only this time it's
existentially tinged - not economically -
and yes, reading a newspaper at any "sensible" hour
of the day is rather pointless...
you can get very impressionable in the morning,
at around midnight, with a whiskey and a cigarette...
while everyone is already nodding off in Luna's
embrace - never understood reading newspapers
in the morning... or in the early afternoon -
it's better to digest the **** of the individual by the world
while everyone is asleep... less democratic constipation
of everyone having a go... or as Auden said:
all the ****** of the world write at night...
well, during the night: everything is apparently black
& white... the vacuum of the space, and the punctuation
of Zodiac are what this sort of writing best describes,
given that, we are the mediators of two opposing
chasms... to be honest... poets hate colour,
the whole spectrum of colour, from
red (λ nanometres 760 etc. and Herr Hertz, whatever)
to violet (λ nanometres 424 - 380) -
    so tiny, this puncture... equatable with
the size of the universe and that spec that's called earth -
to me? all of this is a massive accident -
as the gambling king said (god): oops... dunno.
but from what i can see... poets have colour -
hence the white page where all colours are entombed,
and better than scattering the white into the visible
spectrum, beginning as Newton with a needle hole
and a prism... no... we're probing it with something else,
intent on it being given to us in total,
a sum of all parts... or as they say: shying away from
the people in grey suits... virtually taking risks on meeting
the people in white coats - and how to slur and
window-lick our way into confined spaces
perfecting our skills in Paper Mâchés and Matisse-like
cut-outs.

i swirl in van gogh.
i am charcoal stains
on blue,
a smile of barbed wire
for the painter,
i am mona lisa, true.

monet, he paints me
calm waters,
water lilies floating
in solitude,
he doesn't see
the fire sprouting
in my veins.

picasso cannot stain
my heart with colour,
magritte cannot
create a masterpiece
out of my eyes.

to be immortalized
i beg in pink
lick the brush
and paint myself
alive.

end my days
in escher,
sketch myself
out of the stairway,
into the globe.

throw myself
at deaths eye,
kiss the canvas
rotten, ******,
*pretty.

dead head the roses,
suffocate in silk. stifle
their feelings.

dead head the roses,

suffocate in silk, stifle

their feelings.

bundle them blind with
bloodied rags, boiled

clean.

bind them twice. the smell
is decay.

Magritte.

sbm.

This is not a poem.

Clouds
cover my thoughts
the fruit of knowledge
covers my face
I can,t keep up
with hypocrisy's pace

break it up break it up

I wish I could smile
just once for real
it feels so vile
just for a while
make it real

How can you just move on?
A highway to ignorance
200 mph
until you crash into reality

I am the forbidden fruit of knowledge
Or am I being covered by it
Do I even have any?
maybe it's all a lie
Imagination to face reality
show me your
true face
face the truth.

“How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out
Yes! No!”
–Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!”

1.

The coils of this labyrinth remind me of the small intestine.  This vexes me.  Walking the labyrinth is supposed to be a spiritual experience, isn’t it?  Neither time nor place for unlovely images of the body.  The truth is that I dislike the labyrinth.  I find it too constraining, too tedious—all these looping, repetitive coils.  The truth is that I hate the labyrinth because it is pale and remote, and silently indifferent to me.  If I am going to engage with something, I’d like for it to talk back, please.  I have questions, you know.  I have some concerns.  And perhaps just one or two small issues with control, and delayed gratification.

2.

“I think serenity is not something you just find in the world, like a plum tree,
holding up its white petals” (Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!”).


3.

“Watch how we encounter each other,” you say, and we walk, slowly, separately.  Around one turn we meet, and you kiss me, and your tongue is muscular and wet.  Around another turn you say, over your shoulder, “Hello,” and continue walking.  It is hard for me to keep my balance even though the path is smooth and flat.  I feel like we are in a Magritte painting.  Your white shirt glows softly somewhere to the left of my awareness.  A voice not connected to your body says, “Do you like my hat?”  We are walking.  We are together.  We are not together.  


4.

“Imagination is better than a sharp instrument.  To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work” (Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!”).


5.

So now:
Quiet, quiet—the darkness is full.
Your skin is listening
to the night air.

In the center of the labyrinth, someone has placed a gift.

Quiet, quiet—someone is telling you a story.
The oldest story in the world, and his body hums and pulses
under your fingers.

In the center, there is a gift.

Quiet, quiet—this is not walking.  
This is surrendering to the path, your body long and outstretched
against the stones.

In the center, someone has placed a gift.