In articulo mortis

One day, like Robert Walser in the snow

transported by death to be a character in his own work,

you will quit existence, cut off with the

firm hand of a seasoned censor modifying

reality and everybody who knew you

will desperately try to fill or ignore the hole

you left, the hole to the abyss that wrenches

our guts when we still exist by it's message:

"Nothing in life matters."

Only ignoring the necessity can we live on,

refusing to recognize our fate as much as we can,

so that we can go on, past the figure laying in the snow,

past Victor Segalen sitting with his back on the tree,

looking at the opened Hamlet forever with

eyes that no longer see, in his endless

early summer, endless death, a symbol

of easy passing. It came as a moment

of surprise, him a victor in Russian

roulette, dying not knowing what game

his failing body played, looking at the

many years before him, thought

which hid the abyss from his mind

when his heart stopped.

29.04.2013

In memoriam Lew Welch(1926-71)

I was reading Lew Welch's letters

and a tremendous outburst of pity

came rushing up in my mind,

flooding it.

You should

have stayed in the marketing,

Lew, written poems on the side,

not let yourself adrift in the

world of bohemian literature,

where even the big sharks

often enough ended up finned.

One day you left on your

long walk in the mountains,

all alone, and it's still

unfinished. Let it be

beside a clear rushing stream,

in the shadow of trees,

that you await to be

caught up.

28.04.2013

Today I am angry,

writing poems wishing the death of the president

- mine, although I did not vote for the bastard

with a first name derived from the bible -

and ridiculing members & voters of his bourgeois party;

it's all about class, of reading

about a doctoral thesis, envy,

hate and all myriad repressed moments

when I was nice and polite to those

arrogant, snobbish arseholes

thinking that I would make it,

that it would be worth of all

the grovelling and turning the other cheek.

I didn't, it was all for nothing,

and now, on this fine spring evening,

I want to rip all of them into pieces,

appendages falling

into pools of the brightest red.

28.04.2013

Reflection of the blue sky of spring evening

in a muddy pool nestling between the roots

of a tall, leafless birch tree,

wavering in the wind.

28.04.2013

All the rich people of the world,

what can they do for us?

Should they go on "creating wealth",

doing the magic of capitalism,

letting us to feed on morsels

dropping from their loot

being carried to tax havens?

As economies, societies, states

and the multitudes of people

buckle under the weight,

falling on their knees,

carrying on their back

this Olympus of greed -

should this go on?

Should they go on bribing

the politicians, buying

the courts and getting

the laws and regulations

they want?

Should we still believe

in their myths,

let them get away with

trampling people

and the planet alike?

It's either them or us,

it's either a world

worth living for,

a worth living in,

or a hellhole ruled

by the heartless,

a planet wasted,

humanity enslaved

for greed of those

who wallow in

wealth like pigs

in mud.

What they can do to us,
the wealthy,
is to hang themselves
before they are hanged.

25.04.2013

St Andrew's Hospital, 1964

Perhaps there was some kind of cosmic, unsympathetic karma

at work, balancing the scales and then some more,

when "Bosie's" only, mad, childless son

ended up incarcerated for thirty-seven years,

the sins of the father and the grandfather amply

laid upon his schizophrenic back, and

I wonder whether in the end the younger orderlies

any longer bothered to say "Lord" or "Sir"

to the madman who was there before they were born,

in the former General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes,

a place for genteel madness, separate from

the common people, the descendants of bad blood.

25.04.2013

The future was born dead,

buried in secret,

and the past wheeled out

in it's place as the

wrinkled infant

of hope.

24.04.2013

A long walk as the Sun sets,

shadows combine

and light retreats

over undulating hills;

orange, red the horizon

like in the memories

flooding my mind,

past joining today

like the patches

of shadows coming together

as evening. The

embers of today

briefly ignite

from flames long gone,

and for a moment

my fragments

separated by time

are one.

20.04.2013

If you kill, kill with a drone
and you fly far above the law,
no manhunt for you,

no shootouts with the police,

but a firm belief all around

that no one can touch you

even when you keep killing

and hundreds lie dead.

19.04.2013

Killer of little children, master of the drones

lamenting the death of a child in a bomb attack,

speaking about justice

and either he believes it

or he's a great actor,

and when he goes back to his oval office

another list of proposed people to be murdered

to go through,

to choose who might be left out,

who to be killed with collateral damage,

lines of dead bodies,

children, women, old people

in pictures of some Reuters photographer

getting little attention

when Boston gets so much.

This is the world, this is the morality

that makes people

build bombs and let them explode

in public places among crowds,

killing eight-year olds watching their father run;

the rank hypocrisy, the long lines of the dead,

the indifference towards the lives

and suffering of others.

For injustice is a seed from which

violence grows, acts

of evil begetting evil.

19.04.2013

37 dead in bomb strikes and

shootings in Iraq yesterday,

over a hundred dead in Syria's civil war.

Small news items and then

3 dead in Boston, USA, and

the world media goes wild

in it's eagerness to prove

how lopsided it is,

how all human beings

are not equal to it.

Over 100 dead in Syria,

thirty-seven dead in Iraq,

but the three dead in Massachusetts

leave all the other dead in their shadow.

When all lives are not equal to you,

dear world media,

you show the same attitude

as whoever planted the bombs

in Iraq, Syria and - yes, United States.

16.04.2013

It's raining, drops hitting brown puddles

among mud and snow,

and I shiver,

this late, autumn-like spring

full of so much sorrow

that is again coming into view.

Ruins of lives, like a dead season,

seen again, longed for again.

16.04.2013

Days of early spring,

so gray, so wet, so muddy.

Deciduous trees with their leafless,
out-streched branches,

begging the weeping sky

for a brief sunlight to pierce the white clouds

that almost hug the earth -

brief sunlight, a coin for the beggars

standing silent beside the

gravel roads snaking through

the brown fields,

dark evergreen woods of the taiga

slowly marching to the north.

One hot day, after hundred orbits

of the Earth around the Sun,

the forest will stand,

still short but ascending,

on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

15.04.2013

Spring rain,

snow melting in

the morning mist,

thoughts lost

among the gray clouds,

drifting.

13.04.2013

Time tears and throws away

the petals of the flower of life

until all are gone

and the blossom itself,

discarded, falls on them.

13.04.2013

Nabi Saleh

Three or four dozen people

marching down the gravel road

in brilliant sunshine,

past the white houses

on to the fields,

and there, waiting,

few jeeps and a handful

of occupation soldiers,

waiting with tear gas

and rubber bullets.

The very act of walking

on their own land

is now an act of defiance

out of necessity

12.04.2013

Let me be the wind
between the stars,
let me be the dust
from which planets are born.

Let me be the salt

in oceans of planets yet unborn,

let me be the first breath

of billions of beings to come.

Let me return

to what I was before thought.

Let me be again

the universe from which I was born.

11.04.2013

It's raining on Saturn,

from the rings water

falling,

a rain

that has lasted

billions of years,

ever-falling.

11.04.2012

Land and time

Fragment

Sadness of the long ages, time flowing like a river

through the valley carving the ruins and the land,

felling forests and giving them birth,

making rudimentary roads and raising villages,

bringing pestilences and famines to feed the soil,

ever moving time flowing through the valley

as the ruins crumbled and were joined with new ones

the slow decay as what was human built

sought to join with the nature,

slowly throwing away it's form so that the

feet, mind and hand that walked and worked the land

didn't recognize the natural stone from the man carved one,

the hills created by the ice age from a one

raised as a monument to his kin so long gone to dust.

The time flowed, the river broke it's banks,

the human beings came and went

and where once were their graves

soon were meadows, a forest, a field

throwing up bits of bone to the farmer to wonder

beside his neighing horse.

Snow fell, sun shined, rains came,

and one day someone picked up

his white bone in amazement,

walked in muddy boots to the house

to call the authorities just in case,

and time flowed to the moment

when his grandchild with frantic fingers

would push numbers in her cell phone

when he laid collapsed, heartbeats slowing,

on the same field seeing the clear, blue sky

darkening on the edges of his vision

as time left him on it's bank.

11.04.2013

We are just
a spark of light

fading

08.04.2013

Once I was something else,
the sovereign of endless possibilities
- so many paths before me
to that last sunrise, last breath
and now,

I am a caged prisoner
of my own choices
facing a cul-de-sac
and all those paths are closed,
all traces lost of
what once glittered in the light
of the first morning
as a promise,
those barely discernible lives
that I buried
on my way here.

05.04.2013

Can it ever be possible

to be free of past mistakes,

of misdeeds, of good acts

not done, of evil witnessed

without intervening, of

kind words not said when

still able, of the times when

red rage took over, when

anger dictated words,

when we were less

than we could have been,

when we didn't help,

when we offended,

when we tormented,

when we were the bad guy,

when we were the reason

for sorrow, for pain,

when we were

on the wrong side?

No.

Those acts built us,

moulded us, shaped us,

made us, are us.

We are all the wrong

we have done,

have thought,

have witnessed,

have heard of

or read of

without acting.

We are the sum

of our own sins.

03.04.2013

Anger and love must collide

and beget a revolution

that shakes the humanity

in all possible ways

and never ends.

Mind, body, streets, nature

- the whole planet

to the last individual

must be a battlefield

where revolution is waged.

A revolution of action,

a revolution of pure, free drinking water.

A revolution of thought,

a revolution of silent contemplation

in the mountains empty of human voices.

A  revolution of stones against tanks,

a revolution of tanks against banks.

A revolution of the human spirit,

a revolution of kindness towards the oppressed,

a revolution of anger against oppression,

a revolution of love for all that lives

and will ever live.

A revolution where everyone leads

and everyone follows,

a revolution where fight is for all

human beings who live,

who ever lived,

who can come into existence.

A revolution to last until the end

of the universe and beyond.

04.03.2013

To Iain Banks

Others prepare to exit,

others to enter the stage of life

to play the roles in commedia arte

that suddenly veers into tragedy,

ripping the masks away,

revealing the flesh and the pain

that come together as existence. 

04.03.2013

Another day dying,

Sun reaching the gate of the underworld

to fight the beastly menagerie.

A dung beetle shall

push it up in the sky again,

a Sisyphus of re-creation.

04.03.2013

You could as well carve
your name in water
as in a tree trunk or a rock.
Time shall erase it
like cleaners clean graffiti
from the cityscape.
But before that
it has erased you.

03.04.2013

For far too many

"Western" people

the only lives that matter

in the Middle East

are those of European Jews

murdered 70 years ago.

03.04.2013