The Day Before Your Funeral

Cold, gray mid-day, the day

before your funeral. Nothing

moves outside. I'm shivering,

drinking bad coffee, black,

ran out of milk. In this

room where you spent

so much time, you died. Soon

three weeks, and tomorrow

I will be carrying

you to your grave, far

from where you were born,

at a sauna among the

ruins of a burned town. So

many years, so short

a life, you both

now, my father

and my mother, away

in the cold ground,

and your faith in

me, what I have to

show for it? All

those sacrifices, all

what you did and

what you gave up -

nothing, nothing.

Just years like

last summer's dead weeds

breaking through

the snow of the past.

16.02.2017

Andre, Henry, Roger and the other Roger and so on...

One can whine about 'socialist realism',

but look at all the pedophiles

producing the 'bourgeois literature' 

of the time; a cabinet of monsters.

Genius justifies everything,

goal of social progress and equality nothing

- so say the

guardians of literary immortality still.

And when a genius betrays everything

he claims he stood for, what he claimed

society and civilization stands for,

when he betrays basic human decency...

Then he's still a genius, a worthy one,

his work adored, his crimes pushed aside,

justified - he didn't really hurt anyone,

did he, when he fucked a ten-year-old?

Because he was bourgeois,

he made art for the sake of art,

he made art for the bourgeois

and for the bourgeois who despise the bourgeois.

He was one of them, one of them

who have the keys to the kingdom of literature,

who anoint with holy oil the chosen

and put laurels on their embalmed heads.

27.03.2017

Against the defense of a sexual predator Andre Gide by Edmund White

But as Alan Sheridan writes of Gide in his comprehensive (et compréhensif!) book, ‘surprisingly, no complaint was ever made against him, either by a boy or by his parents. He was, of course, protected by the innocence of the times. But he never forced his attentions on anyone.’

Edmund White: On the chance that a shepherd boy …

London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 24, 10th December 1998.

Except poor boys, barely in their teens,

living under colonial military occupation,

who had to prostitute themselves to survive

and help their families to survive.

Poor boys who sucked his dick to get bread

and who let him put his dick in their asshole

and fuck them

so that they could get almonds and dates

to bring back to their siblings to eat.

But they don't count, do they, Edmund White?

And the 'innocence of the times' -

perhaps 'someone' just got through

part of his 'private education'

by sleeping with his history teachers?

A Memory From the Eighties

I remember awakening among the clouds

on the top of a Norwegian fell,

moss and lichen and rocks

all else erased by the clouds

and behind me a tent, in

sleeping bags my family,

my whole world that circle

of thirty meters of silence I could see.

Below, the fjords, the blue sea,

somewhere behind the NATO base

we had driven past - No Stopping -

and the nuclear war fears

the time harboured, the fear

of sirens, of a message in the radio,

the cloud. The end, silent.

What hour was it? I didn't

know. Deep northern summer,

the endless light, seeping

through the clouds; timeless

moment, timeless

existence, and

behind, in the tent

my whole world.

25.03.2017 

Its not news in this time of ours

that someone eats human brain in a TV program,

what is newsworthy is

that some people still get offended by it.

And what is even more surprising

is that some care

about them being offended.

So quaintly charming.

11.03.2017