MAROONED IN TIME

Writing is a form of time travel,

the words itself the vessel to carry our message

downstream time.

Yet unborn hands to pick up

our message, to

read it; the wish -

then our minds connect,

the dead and the unborn / living,

breaking the walls of continuum

caging us,

separating us,

marooning us.

28.09.2017

EPHEMERAL

To Ari

In the cellar, a rock rises out of the cement floor,

around it the remains of 64 years of human habitation.

Water seeps up from the ground beside it.

One almost eternal, the other endlessly rejuvenating.

Here before the building rose,

here when it's gone. The house

barely exists for them, this cement floor

and walls rising to the wooden ceiling
placed there by long-dead hands.

28.09.2017

WE CAN'T LEAVE OUR LIVES BEHIND WHEN WE DIE

"It's not that you're leaving, it's that you — that you stayed."

John McCain

After we have gone, it doesn't matter

that we once stayed,

because the knowledge we stayed

departs with us

and is no more.

We think the world will remain,

all that we did within it,

and the memory of our deeds and life.

But the world wipes its slate clean,

and is but an ephemeral phantom

in the greater void.

SCENES FROM THE GENOCIDE OF THE ROHINGYA I

a naked child climbs up a riverbank in mud

at least she's not floating in the river

and causing us to feel a little bit of guilt

now we can just go with a fleeting sense of pity

before moving on

24.09.2017

The rooms bare of furniture now

are not empty; they are

full of you. You live in each

of them. Sometimes you

even acknowledge me. Like

now, you sit at the table and

watch me write this. Are

you there in some state

after death, or from another

strand of time? Some moment

colliding with mine? I

don't care; you are there and

only that counts, my father...

24.09.2017

The evening's final light.

On the ridge, the village's

houses with their halos.

The people may be sinners,

but their abodes are holy.

24.09.2017

MINIATURE IN AUTUMN

Blanket of fallen

yellow and orange leaves

around a mushroom with a brown cap,

over green lichen. Waves

of shadows and sunlight

come and go.

24.09.2017

TO H. D.

Do little
o Hilda

24.09.2017

THUS BEGINS THE DAY

Dave Brubeck still ringing in my ears.

The sunlight is edging closer to the yard.

It's bright morning of a cold September.

Vapor from my breath and steam

rising from the paper coffee mug in

my hand mingle. A bird

is singing, another answers.

Poor shivering dinosaurs.

24.09.2017

AFTER READING LEW WELCH'S LETTERS TO JACK KEROUAC

I understand all those Napoleons and Christs.

To be oneself is a terrible thing.

We all want to be something else than ourselves.

We look at heroes and role models, say

"I want to be like him."

So we try, and fail. Only fools succeed.

But those Napoleons and Christs

escape the failure by escaping themselves.

No longer the burden of being

something no one knows

and no one understands, ourselves

included. All is clarity,

all is ease, in madness;

with pity the Napoleons and Christs

look upon us who still struggle.

24.09.2017

ON CLEAR WATERS

Beyond the point where indifference

takes over from cravings,

where dreams and hopes are given

one last pitying look,

all that remains is acceptance,

calm and uncaring of 'What if?'

What is, is.

For a little more.

24.09.2017

UNDER THE APOLOGETIC EYES

The vast,

Harvard-educated belly

of Wallace Stevens

makes him look

in old age

like he would have

been pregnant

with more than

just words
and stomach cancer.

24.09.2017

PYGMALION

The marble image

now quivering warm flesh

of muscles and curves

steps down from the pedestal,

and past the kneeling creator,

steps out of the door

without looking back.

Dreams given life

escape from the constraints

of the imaging mind.

24.09.2017

Late The Autumn Sun

Thanks To Anne

Among the white

clouds the Sun, faded.

The wind rustles

the remaining leaves,

orange, yellow

bathing in the cold

sunlight. It's September,

mid-day, a tree

branch is knocking

in the window.

I think of the heather,

the fallen leaves

on your graves.

23.09.2017

Love is lust

that has time to stop

and think.

21.09.2017

THE ARCHITECT OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

Without Judas,

what would have Jesus been?

A traitor makes the martyr.

A betrayer prepares the resurrection.

A divine plan depends

on one kiss.

21.09.2017

THE MOST BORING STORY EVER TOLD

Lucifer was loyal.

There was no snake in the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve didn't pick and eat the apple.

They were not cast out.

Everything stayed as it was. Forever.

21.09.2017

#SAVEHEBRON

Telling the truth is telling only one side,

a Zionist tells me;

his lie matters as much

as the truth I have given him.

I gave him photographs of

two dozen of those killed by Israel,

their faces, their ages,

dates of death and places of death.

He gives me fiction of imaginary people

'killed each day'; and

when challenged, comes up

with three real ones killed two months ago.

When I tell him

what Israel did the accused assailant's family,

he stops. No more fiction for today,

hasbara run dry.

21.09.2017

CLAY MOULDING CLAY

We are to the world

what others perceive us to be,

not what and who

we think we are,

or yearn to be.

We can't define ourselves,

only others,

in an endless circle

of imprisonment,

of shedding identity.

21.09.2017

Catalonia and the Republic of Spain

How could I choose

between the Republic's

red, yellow and violet flag

and between

Catalonia's red, yellow and blue?

Yet choose I must.

20.09.2017

The question without an answer,

and the answer without a question,

crossing, passing one another

without acknowledgment.

20.09.2017

CHAIN OF DAYS

This sunless day,

one in a chain

of days like this

stitched through my life,

evokes all those

before, those days

when you lived,

when the world

was complete,

not this shattered

bowl glued back

together with pieces

missing, missing

but on those days

in this endless autumn

throughout the years.

19.09.2017

Boris Pilnyak(1894-1938)

The fate of the artist in

a society where

literature still matters

is to be wheat grinded

in the mill of the state.

Some live, some die,

all perish.

18.-19.09.2017

SAND-CASTLES AT THE SHORES OF TIME

This is the lesson

the vastness we inhabit

in time and space carries:

Enough time, and

no word or deed of ours,

no act undone matters.

18.09.2017

A SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON

An autumn landscape devoid of movement.

Still. Stopped. Perhaps, ended.

Whatever word you want to use.

Or silence. Silence howls through it.

Enraged, impotent silence.

Above, the milky-gray abyss.

Below, orange, green and shades of brown.

It looks like a well-made prop for a stage.

As long as you watch it from the one,

correct direction to keep up the illusion.

18.09.2017

LEGACY

To Ernest Hemingway

What is left? Your

cats, with their six-toes,

riding out a hurricane.

18.09.2017

FAREWELL TO CASSINI

Just lights around the ringed planet again,

those worlds of seas and geysirs,

the rivers running to methane lakes

a billion kilometers away, shrouded

from our sight.

Our watchful eye has gone, eaten by

the hungry Kronos.

18.09.2017

MONDAY BEGINS ON SATURDAY

This night I'm falling ill, as the sound of rain

comes from the utter black behind the windows.

Headache, probably flu. I threw a blanket down

on the floor, beside the piles of books. Half a

dozen pages of Strugatsky brothers, but I'm

not in the mood for reading, thinking or

sleeping. I'm in the mood for the sound of

rain, falling in lightless void, beyond the

cavern the electricity carves inside. These

hours tunneling into the gray light of morning.

I exist somewhere between the headache

and the rain, defined by them.

16.09.2017

RABID DOG BITES FASCIST

Martin Amis

has condemned Donald Trump 

and 'his Neo-Nazi' followers.

Martin Amis

who says Israel can't be criticized

until it has inflicted on Palestinians

all the sufferings the Jews have ever experienced.

Pot and kettle,

two peas in a pod,

Martin and Donald.

15.09.2017

TO JOHN KEATS

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

The water the name 'was written on' evaporates,

the continent the water was on dives into the Earth's mantle,

and the planet itself is engulfed by the Sun, dying

in a Cosmos fated to whither to matterless void. 

15.09.2017

225 DAYS LATER

There's sunshine, a crisp breeze

and an abundance of green for mid-September,

I have a coffee to drink from a glass mug you

and mother bought, I have this terrace

you made to sit on, the cottage you build

for J before my eyes, your cars still

here on the yard. Sometimes I catch

myself thinking when you

will come back, waiting

to see you stepping out from your

carpentry, walking down the road

back from visiting the neighbours.

An emptiness pregnant with absence.

11.09.2017

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

September 11th 1973.

Democracy in Chile falls to CIA and Milton Friedman.

The bourgeois tell us

that if only Salvador Allende wouldn't have been elected,

the coup wouldn't have been necessary.

As long as voters make a wrong decision,

coups are necessary.

Forward to Honduras.

11.09.2017

Instead Of Translating Bob Kaufman

I wash my face, pour another glass - yes, glass,

dark yellow glass mug - of coffee, sip

the bitter taste and sit down again,

but now having enough of translating poems

no one ever reads I close down the open pages,

think of writing something of my own

that no one ever reads. But,

dear Descartes, what has been written, is.

So, here, hunched over the laptop, I

write these lines as
the morning emerges from the night.

11.09.2017

THE EYES OF QUTAYBA ZIAD ZAHRAN(17)

After two and a half weeks in a freezer

you come back home

glazed eyes wide open in wonder

frozen looking somewhere beyond death

beyond the guns that were pointed at you

beyond the checkpoint and the occupation

and the martyrdom

There is a question in your eyes

and perhaps

perhaps a hint of an answer

09.09.2017

LIVING DANGEROUSLY

When looking for

new poets & poems to discover

online, I

make sure that in the search engine

'Safe search' is 'Off'.

07.09.2017

A Landscape In September

An absent-minded autumn rain falls behind the windows,

the clicks of the coffee machine in rhythm with its sound.

A bloodless landscape bleaching towards winter, casting

away the useless summer outfit, frayed, reflecting itself

in muddy pools, with blackbirds. I have my words to shed,

my leaves to cast out, my long hours bleached, mingling

with the rain, falling.

07.09.2017

The Flesh That Feeds Us

At the Christmas dinner we eat

the flesh of our saviour to honour him -

but the schism, alas, has divided

our faith, so that when we

eat and honour the pig,

they in error bless

the turkey in their bellies!

Oh lord Pig who for our sins

and hunger gave your life,

from their heresies our brethren save

- make them burn the turkey

and let them eat thy flesh

that opens the heavenly gates!

06.09.2017

In The Footsteps Of The Apostle

Finally, we arrive at the end empty-handed;

all the knives we carried at the backs of our victims.

And we even didn't get the thirty gold coins

which our lord and mentor gained with a single kiss.

06.09.2017

Autumn Afternoon

Wind rustles the trees

dressed in green and gold -

a summer wind in autumn, warm

- yet the leaves still fall, gently,

in the September light.

05.09.2017

JUDAS

I am the betrayer, the one who can't be trusted,

the one who can't keep a promise, the one

who won't stand on your side, the one

that won't have your back -

except to put a knife into it.

Behind your back I will tell your secrets,

behind your back I will hurt you;

behind your back I will forge a blade of lies

to carve you open and in blood spill

your life and trust, as a traitor must.

05.09.2017

THALES OF MILETUS

From Phoenicia, studied in Babylonia

and visited Egypt. If you believe

Diogenes Laertios. The first of the natural

philosophers of Ionia, predicted

the eclipse that occurred during the battle

on the Halys river between Lydian

and Median empires. Water was

the 'first cause' for him. Never married.

Fell into a well or a hole while

watching stars, berated by an old

woman that he saw what was far

but not what was at his feet. Made

a fortune to show he could do it. We

give him dates 624 to 546 BCE

and forget about Phoenicia, Babylonia

and Egypt and make him the father,

the childless begetter of 'Western' science.

If he wrote something, none survives.

05.09.2017

To Men Of God

You who know what

a God knows and wants:

God is silent, so be silent.

God is absent, so begone.

05.09.2017

EPITAPH TO A DOOMED FLY

Three cups of coffee on a September afternoon

before I ran out of milk, brilliant sunlight

and a late survivor, a buzzing fly

from the lost world of Summer amidst a golden Autumn

flies around the room. Doesn't it

know we don't take refugees?

Your place is out there, to die

on a cold night, in the embrace of the silver

moonlight, frost covering your wings

that then only know earth.

05.09.2017

Fragments

Stars, drowning in the white moonlight,

bright,

as breeze rustles the trees, in darkness.

The night in September

cloaked in autumn, watches

with eyes of owls and mice and fox.

We walk, the gravel crunching

under my feet, the road

shadows and lunar light.

05.09.2017

P. G. WODEHOUSE(1881-1975)

They say fascism can never be funny

yet laugh while they read my books

and watch comedies made out of them.

03.09.2017

TO EZRA POUND

Poems saved your life,

but how many those of who died

while you praised fascism

and carried out Mussolini's deed

wrote poems themselves?

03.09.2017

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS(1844-1889)

What god these frail reeds gathers,

escaping the petty sins of their dreamy minds

and the fear of living, what god

these sticks of woods would put to bear

the weight of the godhead, terrible and alien,

spread to men? What god

would call the weak and failing, those lost

and on solitary paths to silence, to

stand and preach and be

more solid than the muscular statues adorning

the temples on whose corridors they

like shadows of lost bats flutter?

03.09.2017

THE TRACHILOS HOMINID

On that far shore you stood

on the precipice of everything to come,

all our transformations, successes

and sufferings awaiting,

as the waves of the dying sea

came to meet the river delta

and you stood there, watching,

all these millions of years

the abyss for you step in.

01.09.2017