each night is the same with this man across
from my garden in the cul de sac -
it's almost a contest -
probably your atypical family man,
exhausted from salvaging whatever
requires to be salvaged in a day -
he sits and relaxes watching terrible
sunday t.v. -
he probably missed the cricket
earlier in the day -
after all: cricket is a bit like marmite -
you either love it, or hate it -
i imagine he's a football fan -
in these parts most men are...
yet cricket, ah the cricket -
this year's double whammy -
the world cup followed by the ashes -
and believe me when i say that no other sport
has such a bountiful vocabulary for
all the technicalities of the sport -
it truly is a commentator's dream
to do cricket commentary -
perhaps radio commentary for football -
it would appear that the sound of the crowd
can be more important than the commentator's
voice...
i couldn't, simply couldn't turn
on the box and become sucked in like that...
some viennese instrumental band is
playing in the background while i am perched
on the windowsill sitting on one folded
leg with the other dangling...
reading a book the only way to read
a poetry book - randomly -
i tend to forget any novel-like chronology -
once in a year will i digest
a novel... the order the premeditation -
the many helpings of pedantic editorial concepts...
even the time it takes already oozes
the drama of whether it will be a tedious read...
you really can tell if it took a minute
or an hour to write...

- interlude -

i will not be the next delmore schwartz
(mentor for lou reed) - and try to sell you
finnegans wake - that 65 language babylon -
or what sylvia plath thought about it...
i guess she didn't read much after
the fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)
thanks sylvia... thanks for not reading
the rest of the book, sylvia says that there are
100 letters in this "word"...
a book like that... you will not sell...
sorry herr schwartz...
i'm with seamus deane on this one...
'but then, there is the other, sadder ending:

Paris,
1922 - 1939'

almost like waiting for a new Tool album...
i can't imagine the tedium associated
with having to read the Wake outloud -
i suppose anyone attempting to craft an audiobook
out of this, "monstrosity" - would be a sadomasochist -
should anyone listen to it...
65 languages... yet no use of
diacritic - no orthological study to be found -
at least 10 languages come to mind where
diacritical marks are used...

chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie -
w Szczebrzeszynie

(we used to chase after chafers come the zenith
of summer after sunset as children -
the 4 years from 4 to 8 when i grew up
in Poland are still equivalent to the mines
of king solomon - concerning memory)
alt.?
chžąšč bžmi w tžcinie -
w Ščebžešynie...
well... if we borrowed from bohemia
and the balkans... let's see what the elders
would make of it...
х (rz - no russian grapheme)
(and no tail a: ą)
but we do have... ш + ч = щ
ščekanie psa: the barking of a dog...
"alias" of: the pu-shch-air that she parked
somewhere, sometime ago...

бrzми.... pardon! pardon!
mon dieu!
there is an RZ / Ž in russian! how could have missed
it?! ж... but no... there's no ą....

хжąщ - the alias of жук...

and the french do speak scraps
of western slavic and cyrilic - je suis...
there's a ж in there - believe me...

no wonder i'm terrible at crosswords -
i already have bilingual crosswords in my head -
and from what is bilingual will surely stem
into other languages - i've already made a decent
effort to remember greek -
now st. cyril awaits...
if only the glagolitic would stick...
to me? the glagolitic M (Ⰿ) is a most beautiful letter...
esp. when compared to the runic mannaz (ᛗ)...
for the love of god -
to have a bilingual crossword is enough
to admit to not being to attain pleasure from
these puzzle - sudoku: yes,
the near universal nature of numbers...
which also feeds from the magic sq.s of qabbalah...

but in finnegans wake you will "experience"
65 language, yet no diacritical indicators...
such the somewhat elevated irish pub brawl
slobbering and adding excess letters on a bet -
for the alt. orthography aesthetic of the english
zunge... namely to totter along -
such a naked language...
outside of english
it is difficult to find dyslexia -
you will find orthographic pedantry -
and not from a position of bias -
but western slavic has the most piercing syllable
divisions of words -
i ascribe a clarity of using diacritical stressors...
fwench? probably the worst...

yet finnegans wake is not a necessarily difficult
book... annoying, but not fun annoying
akin to samuel beckett's watt... most certainly not...
i'd have to call up thomas mann's doctor faustus...

- end of the interlude -

so i won today's contest... he switched off his t.v.
and went to bed... while i flicked through
some more of the poetry book i was reading
while downing ms. amber in her ginger ale
jacuzzi...
miroslav holub...
i had to snigger and give a slight giggle too...
animal rights, the last lines:
patiens with progressive
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
can just fuck off. they shouldn't have been born.
hieronymus bosch be with them
for ever and ever amen.

i don't even know what i prefer these days...
going to a gallery and looking at paintings
or opening a book of poetry at random
and... sometimes no reading the poems
in a chronological fashion...

chances are... i will not see or experience
a tornado... this is england, after all...
i will most certainly not be found
on a boat a mile away from the eye
of a hurricane...
this is the closest i can ever come to
chaos... well... if you've read a book and really liked
it? i either entomb a flower in them -
mummified, of course,
put a flower in a book and flatten it...
wait for the pages to soak up the moisture
(a bit like putting a few grains of
rice into a pepper shaker if the pepper is
moist)... or a postcard...
the national gallery -
the toilet of venus (the rokeby venus)
by diego velazquez...

p.s. this is on an unrelated note...
i hate freud... with a passion...
he gets one thing right (the madonna-whore complex)
and the rest is just... short-cut philosophy...
that whole three tier schematic of
the dissected meta-brain of man...
the congesting super-ego and id...
of the ego...
well here's a shortcut
to end all the freudian shortcuts...
I³ -
at least the jungian shadow i can comprehend -
i sometimes talk with it
like a pitiful sinner discloses his petty sins
to a masturbating pederast priest behind the curtain.