the measure of man

you wanna measure the man I am in this mean manner, mate?

making it a matter of muscles, like castles of sand,

and the hand! the hand!

oh, how beautiful, you decree,

when it packs a punch,

when it blows a fist.

you insist that I ain’t your brother,

at best a sister,

as in a sissy, a pussy,

a poofter, or a cyst, a blister in your perfect system where

either or are the only alternatives… and you call that freedom.

newsflash:

I realised a long time ago that if sexuality comes down to picking what toys to play with,

dolls for the girls, guns for the boys,

then I’m afraid I don’t tick either box with sufficient conviction

I decided that if gender is a matter of blue or pink,

then I ‘d rather forever merge into purple,

the colour of bruises

lest we forget abuses perpetrated

singularities negated

and still

a tear never trickled down these cheeks

the hurt stayed put, a dog trained never to bark,

let alone bite.

the pain confined and invisible and the pressure

growing on the inside like so much steam

that by age fourteen I could have counselled a guru on self-control,

sixteen and I feasted on the bullies’ abuses like a forbidden fruit

at seventeen my reality of choice was daydream

and by nineteen my voice spoke a different tongue,

because that’s how far I’d run from

those high school halls that seemed built to echo to perfection

their design ensured that each insult would strike with maximum efficiency,

bouncing words off walls like darts in cartoons,

like thunders with a thousand tentacles

- the punch would thump from every angle,

ceiling to floor,

from tickle to kick to the prickly pinch of a blow in the ribs

or the old trick of the ruler whacked on the back of my neck,

remember that?

…

I kinda miss those good old times

sometimes,

when rednecks and teens were my only enemies,

no subtlety required back then

for five to one was the prestige of their little boys’ club

they attacked with the might of the pack

and kicked

kicked and waited till we cracked

and we all agreed I clearly lacked the pedigree

to join in

I had never evaluated virility with the measuring stick of my dick

or by

how far I could piss

never turned a woman into a bitch to wear her

like a badge of honour

but the bullies have turned to ninjas and learned new moves

flying kicks of acceptance,

the bigots have turned to wizards who spin new spells behind the abracadabra’s of

tolerance

and –gosh, how daring!

even gay marriage.

they paint my ghetto pretty and tell me that I’m free

they say things are just peachy,

no need to get preachy.

Sixteen definitions of poetry and some attributes.

Poetry is language despite itself.

Poetry is rarely sense - and never meaning.

Poetry is a search for morals within the immorality of language, a search for freedom restrained (and defined!) by the despotism of the word.

Poetry is rhythm and melody. It tunes itself to the primordial utterances of a savage, to the deafening gushing blood, to the open wound of the initiated individual, desires the pounding heart of the chased prey.

Poetry is one weapon of the working class hero, along with a body privatised and sold off on the labour market. Along with the will and the potenza of the poor.

Poetry is never done with. It is never done. It never quite is.

Poetry watches the State machine more attentively then how the latter spies it. It escapes coding, and taps into the streams that the State machine floods with stolen waters, where nothing really flows but stagnates under CCTV surveillance, and conjures currents of its own invention, blows its own winds and in them flies its own flag.

Poetry responds to the demand of the straight-jacketed self, a most improbable leap of non-sense, from one cliff over here to another over there, annihilating distance.

Poetry is a limit tending to zero and infinite at one and the same time, and the omnipotence of human imagination.

Poetry is the tool whereby a unity of consciousness in nature is sought to be restored, the aesthetic par excellence alchemically morphing into the ethical.

Poetry is fatum, fate, that which has been said, announced, pronounced. It is a new law.

Poetry is an intrinsically revolutionary practice.

Poetry is a short-circuited formula where ‘game minus rules’ most definitely does not equal cheating. The apostate of civilisation, the anti-prodigal son. The offspring that negates its genitor.

Poetry is a riddle, on the run. A paradox when chained in prose.

Poetry is music. A tribute to silence.

hey man

Hey man,

you little man growing in the world,

let me tell you what I know:

first off:

make your world

      

posit alternatives - choose others better suited to the

     flights of your soul,

   that you humours rejoice in the clean

air of a paradise,

id est a freedom space in this land of lines and signs,

~~~~inject some vice,

yes: refuse this, confute these truths,

conjure collusions, intrusions,

a fusions holy of dream and wake,

little man: fake it till you make it: this is your boogie woogie!

second: in my world mine is the last word and mine the saying alone,

this tongue o’ mine’s a whip,

this language here I flip it – I twist it, yeah… I risk it all

this mental thread to cut and paste

I waste no breath, the import justifies the haste, so here’s a taste…

…could I amaze?

little man growing within me in the world around,

we are like Russian dolls

or onions

we’re an infinite snake which peels off eternally

  and internally regenerates,

which fact reiterates our common origins,

our brotherhood with life and death.

Vita brevis—

?

I’d say “mors brevior ” or… “till birth do us part"

-and  hurrah to me for stating the obvious!

Hurrah! madames et messieurs

or else I’ll be the beast, and you - gladiators:

twice be eaten by the tooth of the lion,

twice torn by the claws of the hawk,

twice gored by the horn of the bull and

twice thrown in the boiling pool.

see, little man?

this is no phoney school, but a brawl of enlightened fools, the stars tell me –again -  it is the top of the morning, flat ass on the kitchen bench and rum o’clock, but mind you: this is a new me, this ain’t a guy with a broken heart no more, this ain’t the struggling man-child fighting his protracted teens, no

 boom!

[drop the metaphors here and adopt a clear language------------------]

FUCK NIHILISM

Because life is a layered drink,

and the sweetest spirits

choose

the bottom of the

shot glass.

so, little man, listen, to a slightly bigger man,

listen, if you please

and

then go into the wild,

into the clubs,

into the institutions,

listen

to the promises of man

and listen

to his lies

examine

every wedded pair of eyes

little man,

learn the lessons you’ll be taught

til silence return:

 three days -three months -three years,

from the steep side of sunlight

lizardish y’absorb the heat,

whore-like, alone and cheap

or god-like, dear but beat

little man big trouble, squabble not. unravel

n b

THE STRUGGLE AND THE EXODUS

long before the feet did

it was my eyes who left, my heart

sore and wet, shiny like a full moon in the sea, moist like fog

and just as impenetrable.

i kept a steady pace, over the mountain tops,

beyond the rocky crown of homeland

searching for the marching beat, scanning my changing horizon for a spiritual parent, a poet, a revolutionary

and finding allsorts, more often

scoring a fuck than salvation

but learning to apprehend something

from everything,

that a teacher can wear as little as a cockring

or all the world’s phd’s wrapped around his or her humanism

till his or her humanity’s been covered

deflected, surpassed in the name of curricular

                                                               activity

                                                                        & dispensed.

long before my feet did,

it was my joy, who parted ways

to save itself and find a buddy

in someone else’s despairing fits of life disguised as pubescent rage

and

dance along creaking floorboards through the night

along the po, canals, the thames,

the yarra hand in hand

to comprehend in steps the mysterious waltz of friendship,

the spinning polkas of love at first sight in a drunken bar, dark in an alley, soho square

dover house - our unglorious chelsea hotel,

our dips and troughs, and our

flops, even they were flux, flight, flow.

sure enough, for coherence dictates our every move,

limbs were set into motion,

rather a gentle marathon – swift feet carried away,

as if a new order of church bells – appealing, these ones, redemptive

were summoning us,

as if our own will was sirens in the distance, their song persuading us now

as before it’d charmed and teased.

& lured i was – with you,

suddenly: communion, a partnership.

and if the rest is history

as in a story we write black on white, sweat on forehead, man on man

if it is true that our bodies bear the marks of each caress and kiss

like an ariadne’s thread leading us back

to our freedom of choice, the choice to chose love every time

we had a choice

then

i have no/thing to regret

you have no/thing to forget

we’re on the right track

the only path where value is still valued

where the market is a place we go to, to feed body and soul

and not a poisoned cornucopia

of dislodged ciphers, the evil of goods unhinged from reality: the reality of people struggling for human recognition

the reality where the square is not what we are commanded to think within and vacate when thought steps out of it

but the ancient gathering space to which we add dimensions of solidarity,

that the poor enrich

where poetics equates praxis

where word equals sword and

blood is never spilled for anything less than

an idea of freedom that would put the angels to shame in their pale,

sickly promise of transcendence

because long before we stuffed our heads with slogans

we had mouths full of poetry

before the prism split us into rainbow

to separate the colours

red from green, black from blue, me, not you

before power was a spell to be under or atop

we were sun, thunder, dirt and crop.

the extent of my needs

in their precocious browns the leaves -

in precious golds  - they shoot thru the air

like messengers of seasons in the making

another layer flaking off the tablet of time

 and heading groundwards

for to feed bugs of today,

grass blades of next week and

making me

a bed of dirt for when the carousel runs no more

and i upgrade to a raft on lethe

it’s a saturday,

sky diaphanous seemingly devoid of atmosphere

we recline and showcase our best symposium etiquette under the delicate weight of how elegantly we dip lentil balls in hummus

- how comfortably we share secrets, perhaps because for strangers

blabbing out the truth is the only way to carve radiance out of the dark of anonymity

or

because in our history of no more than an hour we’ve already unearthed hidden affinities

that accelerated intimacy somehow, adding an element of

fate to what was gonna be but a triple x date

like the fact that both of our names contain, in different languages,

the word for people

or that despite a shared love for autumn in melbourne,

neither of us is ready for this one yet

oxytocins dance like sufis in the aura of this our first meet

hormones parade like a springtime fair and

whenever I go to roll a cigarette you ask ‘want some dope in there?’

and each time my reply is ‘why not…’

until the green grass acts on my behalf and

spills my beans for me, figuring honesty will buy me your love,

or something along those lines

‘kiss me’, i say

‘but we’re not fucking tonight’

i am on the hunt for a narrative - a tale to take home

not just your smell on my skin,

not just a palette of bodily fluids

the gay business card…

even though fuck only knows

the extent of my need for touch

i could map it out for you, unroll it in the shape of a lust-red carpet for you to pace upon,

and man, you’d catwalk a long while,

from here to satisfaction the path is infinite and the trajectory divine-abolical

especially if you, like me, set out to travel it anyway,

disregarding

the compass of the humble and wise that warns:

beware! the stomach of want will always be ravenous

you’d better learn to go hungry and pretend you couldn’t possibly

take another morsel, be it a bit of art, of ass or grass, human heat, or god’s touch

so be my guest, feel my unrest

not just my cock thru these denim pants,

because i never thought i’d ever beg and plea for less flesh and more soul

less feeling up and more feeling full stop

but I am

shame you have to be my first nay

after so many aye’s

spat out with automatic eagerness,

pity, really, that the ultimatum of the heart that feels left out and claims his share

should land on your ears, that the hand unwelcomed should be yours,

a gentleman’s hand

a true rant.

 Today I endeavoured to offer myself as a vassal to the ambition of naivety which seems to me to be the founding protein of happiness. I tried to moult and halt halfway, shed layers of skin without coming up with a newer one, not feeling the need for it, I tried the road of immediacy, arm wrestling between the hardest cynicism and an open lily smelling still of hope… are we perhaps ascetics? Buffoons? Or normal people? Us, normal people?

But then who, what are we? Human beings? I’d rather go for unhuman becomings: a more pertinent, more honest definition. Still, becoming and being must be one and the same thing, must they not? Being is just as imperfect, if we may put it that way, as becoming, for if the Idea were more perfect than its phenotype, it would certainly be able to manifest itself incorruptible, eternal. Who would dare to believe really – and that is: to stretch this faith to its ultimate philosophical consequences – in a divine that doesn’t keep its promise of transcendence even, or especially in the immanent, simply in virtue of its ability to do so? who would want to be so nihilist as to believe in a god whose cruelty condemns his sentient creatures to the chronic, chromosomal imperfection of the universe that he himself created? Is our free will negated by the free will of the creator?

Such cruelty, if mistaken for holy nectar trickling down from whoever spills it up there, condemns the believer who believes in it to a pessimism that far outgoes the presumed frightful solitude and aimlessness of the practising atheist. We must refuse a priori to fall in the trap of the apple held out conspicuously by who knows whom at the centre of a paradise on earth which is, by name and by fact, an irrelevant oxymoron, a croak of shit a la walt Disney that nobody would have fallen for if the church hadn’t had the grandest and most diabolical mis en scene at unified networks, a spiderweb, that is, and moreover a two thousand year old apple, all dried out and putrifying, eternity my balls! No, with my shiny sword hissing and dressed in skin alone, if that, I must defend myself from the fascism of religion, from the mafia of monotheism, this industrial oligarchy that produces replicants of sinners series by series, and I must invent myself to give myself a meaning. An antihuman sentiment, an unhuman love to enrage pope and showgirls, opus dei and parties, I must posit myself only as I am: lonely, and beautiful of ambiguity. Intelligence versus force, rationalist doubt versus omnipotent dictatorial dogma, an attitude that leads to extreme consequences, one of them being turning down the whole if even one portion of it is rotten, a metonymy of civic coherence – and that lily with its guard still kept high unfolds opens obscene and incorruptible til death do it wilt…

We are not mystics, visions and conversions on the way of Damascus, of capitol hill, of a fixed post, that stuff doesn’t make our mouths water, it makes us sick. Still the most spirit lifting news is, listen people, that such visions I have by the thousands, the more than legitimate fruit of the abnegation with which I conduct myself beyond the song of such sirens. My scepticism is repaid with interests by a psyche devoid of the flatterings of 'salvation' behind chastity or charity or a party membership, a psyche that regurgitates the very thing it denies itself. If it is true that good luck comes to those who don’t expect it, then the recompense of the honourable and virtuous citizen – the prize to the man who knows and is himself – is the opportunity to supply a reason to be here rather than taking on one that’s second hand and ready-made. Our foundations are solid, invisible, yet solid. Our ridgepoles and our concrete are not the illegitimate outcome of a fraudulent tender bid, but undeniable rings of a trunk that thickens with us, beyond that ‘beyond’ that we don’t ever buy into, least of all when offered at a knockdown price.

The being alone and in bad company of church-goers betrays the lack of imagination of the human being who is one for the sake of being it. Living life doesn’t coincide with giving it a purpose, and  giving it up to a higher good is, in any case, a weakness. Life certainly doesn’t need a ‘life after’ to be justified before, and not even a premature death in order that we enjoy it in full. The meaning of life is to accept that there is none, yet to insist in embellishing it to dispense a revenge out of our own pocket. The style we endeavour to find in the page and swimming in the tide of time is an added value created out of nothingness, something that reduces the rules of physics and of matter to an abacus in short circuit, where entropy is for us to establish, where nothing means anything in particular but every lash that shuts and opens, each word, comma, square centimetre of skin is symbol and metaphore of an impalpable quid at everybody’s hands, including those who decide to do away with limbs altogether…

Today i offered myself to simplicity, and look where it's gotten me.

puff, sigh, ouch

with disquieting seriousness i took up smoking again. it  seems like the only way for me to deal with the weakness intrinsic to addiction is to transfigure it, to transpose it onto a new level of commitment. if i can't beat the morbid desire for tobacco, i embrace it wholeheartedly.

i wonder what the difference is between such a damaging (and deadly) resolution and the resolution to its exact opposite. after all, i do not think of myself as a nihilist, i don't long for dissolution in nothingness (assuming death is that)... yet the reality of my habits would suggest otherwise. so why should one be so much harder to enact than the other? why is the appeal of what's wrong more appealing than that of what's right? transgression easier than discipline?

the courting of one's own fragility and mortality in the form of rolling, sparking and sucking a cigarette to the very last puff, the one that burns fingers and lips and reminds one that one literally is playing with fire responds in a twisted way to a promethean instinct, the vocation for autonomy and free will.

self sacrifice is a big word, yet the punishing the body through vices that have no redeming sides whatever is nothing but a form of asceticism. it is with a mystical devotion and a sick - but nonetheless real - joy that i inhale on a cigarette. it is with a fear of the unknown in the universe, with a terror for the unknown in human affairs, it is with a sense of safety in loss that i approach the pouch, that i search my pockets, that i expand my lungs. with enormous sadness and denial to match.

but after all, if i dig deeper in the soil of my motives, far beneath the surface where my smoking habits have the appearance of something so idiotic as a physical addiction, i meet the me that smokes metaphysically. i meet the me who smokes because i can. every fag is a declaration of independence, an anthem, a chant... if i can do so much as to hurt myself, no one can possibly debate the existence of free will.

how fucking dumb is that?