To Dino Barberini

Rest in power

Freedom will come,

freedom will come

and you will be there smiling, Dino,

among the crowd, under the flags,

you will be there smiling, Dino,

when freedom comes to Palestine.

30.11.2015

No ethnic-religious grades in suffering

They tell me "it's a different thing"

when Jews are oppressors instead of oppressed;

I see no difference -

oppression is oppression -

and thus they call me an anti-semite,

and oppression "self-defense",

like the past oppressors of Jews

would not have had their own vocabularies of justification

that attempted to make wrong right.

It's always "the same thing". Always.

Your suffering is no more important or less important

than anyone else's. To know

and acknowledge this is to have conscience,

empathy, compassion, humanity -

things that Zionists of all hues lack.

26.11.2015

If I change, if I am not who I was,

if it's a different me who again and again

steps in the cold stream and feels

the polished stones under his feet,

my toes,

if,

then the mistakes of the past

would have not been mine

- then I would be a victim

of those past incarnations,

abused by those vanished men

who left me in their skin.

I refuse that.

I am the sum of my past errors.

24.11.2015

TV shows indoor cycling, web wants to tell me

what new there is about Paris and Raqqa

where once Harun al-Rashid had his court.

Bombs are falling, I wonder about making coffee

but there's little milk to go with it, so perhaps

I just drink some water, mug or two down

my parched, swollen throat as explosions

lighten the skies and how many forcefully conscripted,

how many enslaved die with those in black masks tonight?

Its not that I don't care about Paris, but

what about Beirut or Baghdad or Yemen -

eight months of war and the allies of the "West"

have not made a single move against al-Qaeda or IS,

but of that we must be silent, because even after Paris

geopolitics and realpolitik reign supreme.

Don't hold back emotions, let them guide

your support to our rulers, those who have none,

that's what they want from us, in tricoleur

supporting more war while our leaders and our allies

spare no thought to bringing peace forth in place of war.

15.-19.11.2015

Brief, brief the light of a November day.

Low, low the milk-gray clouds.

High, high the swift birds rise.

Among the mud and the rain

the fallen leaves decay,

among the mud and the rain

the dead grass lies.

Pale, pale the light of a November day.

Cold, cold the wind over the fallow fields.

Slow, slow the rain falling on naked branches.

19.11.2015

All those Yankee Rangers and SEALSs

like insects limbs cut of in hands of boys just being boys

and why not, they are not fully human,

perhaps not even part,

rabid Yankee stains on the globe.

19.11.2015

INTO THE NOVEMBER NIGHT

The afternoon falls into darkness

and fog, November evening

a brief walk, through muddy pools,

into the starless night. Somewhere

along the way I lost what words

I had gathered from among the shadows.

16.11.2015

Paris

Making history with bullets,

painting the path to greater war

with blood, bodies

as signs - "Go to Syria"

and Hollande, after the

death of the victims and the perpetrators,

"We will be merciless."

In Raqqa the wounded self-declared Caliph

must nod in approval;

what is loss of Sinjar compared

to the deaths that are to come?

So the red rivers

to the ocean converge.

14.11.2015

SULAIMAN IS DEAD

Sulaiman Aqel Muhammad Shahin, age 22.

Another death.

Another life taken.

Another car riddled with bullets.

Another body laying on the ground within a circle of colonialists.

"But we are the victims!" say the colonialists.

The living colonialists, each with their gun and smart-phone taking a trophy photo.

The living colonialists, on occupied land illegally,

with the native dead in their feet.

Yes, they are the victims, because... because they say so.

We must believe it.

We must repeat it.

Because otherwise, antisemitism.

Sulaiman is dead.

We see him in photos

making a joke,

with a baby in his arms,

sitting with a Fatah flag behind him,

laying on the ground, dying or dead.

I condemn Israel.

I condemn Zionism.

There are no victims among adult colonialists.

Israel has no 'right to defend itself'.

Sulaiman had a right to live,

Sulaiman had a right to live free,

Sulaiman had a right to live free in a free Palestine.

Sulaiman lived his entire life under occupation.

Sulaiman is dead.

Palestine lives.

09.11.2015

Support the oppressed, oppose the oppressors.

Don't let love or hate blind you.

You can't go wrong.

09.11.2015

At the heart of life

a growing void

where memories like cliffs

by the side of a sea

fall eroded sinking

beneath the waves

of lost past.

06.11.2015

Fields of late autumn,

birds circling in silence

hung between

frost and cold sky.

06.11.2015

Let the world take your pain away

and give it back to you

magnified, with a rosary.

06.11.2015

To Pablo Neruda(1904-1973)

So they killed you Pablo

took a few months or perhaps a year

from an old man fearing what you would say

out there in exile again

racing against death and dictatorship

So they killed you Pablo

they killed you

but here you are still

living in millions of hearts

on pages uncounted

we feel your heartbeat

your voice rising like the tide

on the shore of the Pacific

immortal enduring

sending still lovers into embrace

revolutionaries onto streets

engraving the fallen into collective memory

of the people

06.11.2015

the naked branches of trees

along the edge of the clearing

in the silence of a November afternoon

begging something

to come out of the fog

the frosty ground

06.11.2015

a mat of fallen brown leaves

all over the green moss and dead grass

all over the green moss and dead grass

a mat of fallen brown leaves

like memories atop memories

05.11.2015

Fashionably politically incorrect

Burning the intestines of

Michel Houellebecq

while life still flickers

in the eyes

of his castrated body.

Martin Amis,

alas, is already dead,

suffocated

with his own shit

in a pool of his own vomit

and urine.

There they lie,

side by side,

the fallen weasels of literature.

05.11.2015