Constantine P. Cavafy(1863-1933) II

Blinded by your poetry,

they can't see you for what you were:

A sexual predator

preying on the young, poor

and addicted.

A man who had to pay for sex.

Some even admire you,

envy you even.

For preying on the weak.

31.05.2016

Constantine P. Cavafy(1863-1933)

Those poems of Cavafy which are presented

as personal recollections

and implied to be the author's,

read less real to us

than those placed far in the past;

in those he reaches some

universal essence of what it means to be a human -

in these, we have a man quickly growing old

half-remembering, half-dreaming

encounters and feelings more pure

and bodies more perfect than the impurities

and scars of any real life allows.

The memory of love, lust

and lost embrace distilled by time

to poetry, but poetry

which discards much of that universal essence

to gain a quick remembrance of those moments,

real or imagined, above all.

31.05.2016

Jane Austen(1775-1817)

That terrible beast Jane

and her family of priests who performed no duties

and evangelists of the empire in naval uniforms,

cricketeers and spinsters galore,

their faces venom in old drawings, paintings and photographs,

those drones who knew their place

and the place of everyone 'below' them

and the place of everyone 'above' them.

They would have made marvelous servants

instead of petty masters,

and Jane a perfect maid

and then,

instead of just being an old maid

writing novel after novel about charming suitors,

some lord of manor

could have begetted an illegitimate child or twelve for her

like the lords of manors did back then.

Oh well, the upper middle-class gentry

hanging by its finger-tips from the entrance to the upper-class

had its chronicler in her,

that awful miss Jane.

30.05.2016

Dan Fante(1944-2015)

Wreckage of a life

like yours

offers excellent building blocks

for a literary career -

if you don't mind

putting your own family among

the episodes of your

own drunken escapades,

starting from your pre-teen niece

raped by her own father,

your brother Nick

- the one who

you commemorated with a tattoo

(Killed by alcohol)

in your arm,

the one on whose grave

reads, among others,

'beloved father'.

You didn't mind.

I wonder
how she feels,
reading that poem
of yours?

30.05.2016

THE PAST IS MORE ALIVE

To my mother on her 65th birthday

Drinking the bitter hemlock of life,

tired, under the cloudy skies

pregnant with cold rain,

I imagine you are still a phone call away,

out there, breathing the same air as I,

walking on the same earth as I,

alive, at this ever-fleeting moment of now,

and that I just can't reach you -

like I can't reach you through

these years that you have been lost to us.

29.05.2016

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

uefa champions league final

past midnight
after extra time
tea water boiling on the stove

juanfran shoots the ball against a goal post

real madrid wins the shoot-out

time

to drink some hot tea

take deep breaths

a long walk among the shadows

of the summer night

repeating

it's just football

people are dying of hunger

of lack of clean water

each and every moment

it's just football

juanfran

29.05.2016

I remember seeing the clear depths of the Cretan Sea

below me, the steel cable from the buoy going down, down

into the blue;

a feeling of vertigo overtook me -

and a need to follow that cable to where it would end

on the seafloor. Fighting

that desire I raised my head, looking back

to the shore and saw it distant, the crowd

of people a barely seen union of flesh,

and shocked, I not the terribly good swimmer,

was left there for a long time beside the bouy

kicking water to stay afloat, torn

between two needs, the shore

and the inviting, blue abyss underneath my feet.

22.05.2016

Acre 2016

A flag of Palestine drapes the old tower facing the sea's waves at Acre again,

on this day to remember the Nakba, when the Zionists

thought that with blood and destruction they would create a wave

to carry the natives to far away slums and camps to face oblivion in silence,

only to see that the waves of people like the waves of the sea

come back, withdraw and leave on the beach what they once carried away.

16.05.2016

Our Frozen Capitalism of 1943

Capitalism removed from the shackles of democracy

and from the 'threat' of socialism

always veers towards Auschwitz:

"Arbeit macht frei"

with the freedom being that of the death.

Smelling the ash in the air

someone tries, failing, to play Wagner on the piano

by the open window

as the rest of the party talk of the news from Berlin:

Advances on all fronts and the trains run on schedule.

06.05.2015

The Arctic Sea

I have given up, beside

this gray shore of falling rocks

where the giant waves of faded blue

hit with the anger of the abyss;

I have given up under this steel sky

and having given up I

have no strength to go either

to the clouded paths of my coming

or to the hard, wet rocks below.

I have given up, yet I stay

as the darkness gathers

and brings forth the moonless night.

03.05.2016

Of the Nature of Time

The past is like this day is -

eternal, unchanging,

each moment of it

the ever-lasting 'now'.

Nothing is lost,

nothing will be lost,

all is,

the past, the future, together.

03.05.2016