Of Friends of Israel

The great moral failing of the philosemites

flocking in "defense" of Israel

is that they think that it is progress

that Jews oppress, torture and kill

instead of being oppressed, tortured and killed.

Just like antisemites in the past,

they can't see the humanity of the victims,

just the ethnic-religious labels

according to which they decide who

can be killed and who can kill.

31.05.2015

it makes us uncomfortable

say the tourists on the island of Kos

of the hungry Syrian refugees

watching them eat

30.05.2015

death is the moment

when our active presence ends

and the effects our actions

move forward on their own

until they are mixed

in the great whole of human history

29.05.2015

sunflowers beside the road

little stars bursting in the mind

as we walk

on this long afternoon

one of those when time

doesn't seem to flow forward

(time is a pool not a stream now)

but memories come

flooding the mind

and among them

sunflower constellations

the anchor to this moment

of walking when

like clouds above

all could just float away

27.05.2015

There is nothing outside of existence.

No hand can push through the fabric

of space-time and reach

the absence of everything.

We speak of void, but void

is full of particles, potentiality.

Void is basis from which matter rises

to existence. To cease

is to lack all potentiality.

Death is the absence of energy

to escape into existence.

25.05.2015

The Final Betrayal

to become part of the landscape

continue as a thread woven through it

a song a sound heard in the distance

an echo of a life a whisper in the wind

my mother wanted her ashes

to be spread in Lapland

the dream she could never permanently achieve

the Arctic shores of Norway she gave up

to have us instead

but you can't do that

spread human remains even in ashes

to become part of the loved land

the endless days of Sun in Summer

the long night of the Winter

so near parents sister and nephew

in the old home county

graveyard instead

another betrayal clipped wings

even in death so sorry my mother

that even now you can't soar

to be the land you loved and dreamed of

because law was put before love

24.05.2015

Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

Or, in the other words,

after enlisting in patriotic fervour,

got shot in the back and killed

by subordinates

and the killing hidden

by superior officers.

That's the 'glory' he won.

23.05.2015

Reading long dead monks,

all those quests for enlightenment

dust and sand,

those nights spend looking at the Moon

just words on paper,

thousand years have passed

and they are there,

frozen in their own poems

to those long gone moments.

23.05.2015

Summer, almost,

and I feel something

approaching happiness

watching the half-dressed trees

dance with the winds.

23.05.2015

The spring,

so bright light

in the evening

the Sun's long goodbye

&

in the night,

the crescent moon

over the alder tree

in the deep blue 

22.05.2015

Early in the week,

went to the south

- late spring turning into summer.

Yesterday going to the north,

finding late spring again!

But here, in the cold heights,

early spring,

no bright pale green coat

yet on nature's shoulders!

22.05.2015

Lament for Zenobia's City

Her sons dead, Zenobia was taken away to Rome and legend
as a prisoner. Perhaps she married that senator,

perhaps that fifth-century clergyman was really her descendant.

Perhaps. But her sons were dead, her empire was dead

and soon her city was dead, and now,

it's long-standing ruins, hit by artillery fire,

may die as a sacrifice to a new brutal empire
rising under a black banner.

The silent tombs, carriers of memory,

to be stripped to fund the machinery of conquest;

the temples, palaces and theatre

to be attacked with hammers and explosives

to herald the coming of the Daesh.

21.05.2015

Cloudy, cold morning -

expecting rain

even the birds

have fallen silent.

16.05.2015

Something too often forgotten

Suffering is universal

and so is the need to recognize it;

there are none

whose suffering

would be more

or less important

than others,

no privilege of birth

that should make us

care mor

- or less when that perceived

'privilege' is lacked.

A human being is

a human being

and all the ethnic-religious,

ideological labels

won't hide that.

Everybody matters.

16.05.2015

On the Nature of Art

Do you need an artist to make art?

(flash of genius?)

We can claim:

Making art makes an artist

as much an artist makes art,

through one the other is born

to give birth to it.

Art is deliberate creation.

(in the marble the statue
was already present to the sculptor)

BUT

Art is not a deliberate creation by an individual

aware of their role as an artist. 

(craftsman elevated by posterity!)

Someone else,

someone with authority,

needs to confirm the creation as art:

Art critic, art historian, "other" artists.

Someone who has been given this authority

by a society or a slice of it.

Only the stamp of authority creates

art out of an object,

an artist out of a person.

(social contract of art)

Art and artist are both communal creations.

An individual in isolation

can never be an artist,

their creations can never be art. 

(ouroboros?)

In the end

stand the one or those who first

came up with the idea of art,

the maker or makers

of all artists.

14.05.2015

call for revolution

if word is a poetic object

then it must be a stone

a molotov cocktail

thrown at the world's injustices

and a poem

must be an uprising

a barricade

across literature and society

14.05.2015

a molotov cocktail of words

if a poet

doesn't want to change the world

why is (s)he writing

in the first place?

art pour l'art

is no better excuse

than

'i was just following orders'

if you want to re-arrange

without disturbing existence

go and re-arrange flowers

or a sand garden

a poem should be a grenade

a molotov cocktail

flying through the society

setting it on fire on impact

14.05.2015

rohingya refugees: a crime against humanity

adrift at sea

abandoned

by smugglers

Malaysian navy

and humanity

alike

ten dead in one vessel

thousands in boats

escaping genocide

and not again never again

the empty slogan

we knew it to be

14.05.2015

poetry after auschwitz

dear adorno

of the sad gaze

declaring the sentence

for an age

your time

1903-1969

was not special

in evil

except to you

for you lived it

if there could not be

put barbaric poetry

after the gas chambers

after the ash

there could have

never been but barbaric poetry

in the first place

for human history

is a tale

written in blood

by each generation

in it's turn

& the suffering of

each individual

is of equal importance

whether they died

in the centre of europe

or not

& all are

equally forgotten

as the great wheel

of time grinds

memories

into dust

14.05.2015

connexion

poetry is a message

from the writer of the poem

(some of whom might be called poets)

to the readers of the poem

the people

(often called the audience, wrongly)

who take the dead words

and give them life

each according to

their inner self

14.05.2015

norway

to my mother 

the grey sea

under the grey sky

hitting the grey rocks

sculpting them

like the cold wind

sculpts the

people

you loved it

the shore

that faces the pole

the land

where land

ends

14.05.2015

of the death of poetry: a suicide

a poet who doesn't

(at least occasionally)

write for the people

of their time

and their lives,

their troubles

and their hopes

should not ask

why poetry

is dying

14.05.2015

To United States' Senate

Israel's illegal colonies are more American

 

than apple pie, Super Bowl, homeless veterans, collapsing infrastructure

and black youths shot with a dozen warning shots in the back by white policemen.

They are American virtues

given architectural form.

Colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Jim Crow, racism, segregation,

theocracy, Zionism.

11.05.2015

Night Jazz: Stanley Turrentine(1934-2000) After Birdsongs

Listening to the birds sing outside first

in the cool spring air

shouting after the dog

exploring scents

(it was the fox or the cat or perhaps a lynx)

now with a mug of old coffee beside me

clock ticking towards five a.m.

it's Stanley Turrentine's time

to fill my mind with colours

feelings racing around

like there would be a reason

to be cheerful and hopeful

in this world

where you rise up after falling

only to notice

you broke your knee

hobble forward

until you have to crawl

and die beside the road

that's the human fate

but birds don't know

and nightly jazz

now makes me feel

I don't care

when I do

all of us seven billion cripples

hobbling on after some receding dream

fata morgana

until that grave beside the road

is for dug for each of us too

09.05.2015

 

The Spanish Boy: A Life of Albert Camus

There was a little fatherless Spanish boy

in Algeria under the French rule

whose French father had died for France

and in French soil decomposed,

son raised by illiterate Spaniards

in colonial poverty.

There was nothing more he wanted

than stop being an outsider, to be

a Frenchman among the French in France.

To become was to deny, to exclude,

to embrace the Blackfoots as his people,

to make Algeria into France, into Europe.

Those who did not fit, those could not

fit in an European France in Algeria

he muted, marginalized,

to push himself among the French

to become French in France

the price was to silence, to deny -

with word to conquer the land again,

with sentences to make it anew,

with paragraphs to make the native

the alien in their land, in his land;

the land he pushed away without noticing

in his new identity he embraced

to the end; like his father in his coloured

colonial uniform before him,

he in the uniform of a thinker for France

he too, died in Europe,

away from the land that bursted off the mould

and pushed away the Blackfoots

who knew no compromise,

for they, like the Italian boy,

could only accept being Frenchmen in France.

And there he decomposed,

there his grave lies,

a Frenchman in France in his French grave.

09.05.2015

For England Made Anew

Let fires make ground for new politics

where votes confirmed existing evil,

let Molotov's cocktails
flying through the air

bring forth a future build of

privilege made ash;

let broken windows tell of disaffection

where pensioners voted in droves

to hurt the young knowing

their pensions were safe -

the world for them in a pension,

nothing else of consequence

beyond the Queen Maggot

and her white corpse worms of offspring.

Ruins and fires, police helmets

rolling in the ground empty, smeared in blood,

pools of blood to paint the land anew

and to make the prime minister

eat off the streets the crap of scared police horses

which ran away riderless,

the power vested in violence unhorsed.

Let there be anger, let there be

violence erupting from anger

and let there be hate,

fire from hate to devour,

to leap from one elite residence

to the another;

let stones through windows make homes

of palaces

for the homeless,

let a nation tremble

in the terrible birth for hope.

09.05.2015

After the victory of evil in the United Kingdom

Do not praise politicians for making

"hard decisions", "tough choices"

if nothing ill could come to themselves

as a result of them,

beyond losing power in the next election.

Hard decision is a decision that hits

the one who makes it too, deeply;

tough choice is a choice that

means giving up something

more than votes.

These should result in sleepless nights,

in conscience never giving rest -

at the minimum. At the minimum.

A Rwandan mother had a hard decision:

Which of two chilren bury alive

to save the other. "Mother, this

is not funny anymore",

the child's last words

as genocidaires stood around the

grave with their guns.

That was a hard decision,

that was a thought choice,

that was inhuman,

no politician has to go through that

when they cut benefits

from the disabled,

when they go and privatize

public healthcare.

09.05.2015

 An organism

Read Herman Hesse and Santoka in the lavatory,

diarrhea again,

took urine samples to laboratory this morning,

all those things remains of what go through us

like those words I read -

what will the words leave behind?

What of them will become me,

what will drive me forward

and what end up flushed down the toilet?

So much can be told about us

by medical staff and archaeologists alike

based on our faeces,

but that what remained with us

no coprolite, no urine sample

will reveal. It became us,

we became it,

what we became perished,

except those words we left behind,

the facade of our wisdom.

07.05.2015

For A Better World

As long as there is violence,

let it be revolutionary violence.

As long as veins bleed dry,

let them bleed for humanity.

As long as there is injustice,

let there be fighters for justice.

07.05.2015

Clear, light blue morning air

at five twentyseven

on the sixth of May

and a bird starts singing,

then another,

in the trees that remain

after man and storm

came and went

in their fury.

06.05.2015

At least no blood, like with Francis Drake

Flushed the toilet,

once again diarrhea

my nightly companion.

Sitting there, I read

Santoka. Dead for

seventyfive-years, yet

walking in

the rain, still, the

poor drunk poet

on some mountain

path that leads

only to loneliness.

06.05.2015

Neoliberals

If you want people to reach for the stars,

don't force them to live in gutter.

They won't be dreaming of the stars there,

much, but of drowning you in the sewage.

06.05.2015

The Official Martyr That Justifies the Killing of Unofficial Ones

A young man looks from the photos,

serious in uniform, smiling without one.

Different sources give different birth year:

1989 or 1990. In 2015 he died.

He was shot in the head, died after few days.

May he rest in peace.

But they promote him with a message

between the lines:

This young cop was killed

so it was all-right to kill all those

thousands of brown, black,

homeless and insane

we kill each decade

in name of the law.

Yours, the police forces

of the United States of America.

05.05.2015

Revolutionary Army of Japan

What fine news to end a sleepless night with

as birds sing in the brightening May air outside:

A mortar attack on USA army base in Japan

by a leftwing Revolutionary Army!

Good to lie down on the sofa, warm

with that exuberant feeling that comes of

revolutionary violence against imperialism,

even when it was just two home-made grenades

and I have a breathing mask on my face,

too feeble to do more than write myself.

05.05.2015

Archaeopteryx on my backyard
 

There's something extraordinary

in the first flight of a young bird,

that first step into the unknown,

into air, the conquest of that dimension

like it's ancestors so long ago

in their dinosaur guise

reaching for prey, safety

and this day, this little bird

beating it's wings awkwardly. 

04.05.2015

Garland

I have a right to insult you,

but you don't have a right

to be insulted

or to react,

got it?

But if you insult

my country

or my religion...

04.05.2015

Encounter on a lonely road

Abandoning starving toddler

on the side of the road,

onward rode the samurai

in the monk's apparel.

Even to carry the child

into human habitation

was a deed beyond him.

Distant shrines were calling.

 

Better than throwing a piece of bread

would have been to still to carry a sword

and end the cries of the starving child

left in the wilderness, Bashõ.

03.05.2015

Comment to a man who locked his first wife in an asylum for decades

Time isn't conquered,

time conquers

and in the end,

the long end without an end,

time conquers all matter

and becomes the universe

and the birth of new universes.

Time, you could say, is a god,

and the long end

becomes uncountable beginnings.

03.05.2015