STANDSTILL

Time has come to a stop,

that which used to be a life

flows no more. It

is, frozen. Existence,

existence, just.

30.04.2018

READING THE ENGINES OF GOD

Laying on the white mat, beside

the coffee stains with a coffee mug,

reading about white arctic beaches

in pale sunlight as blue waters

come and the foam mingles with snow;

on the laptop running a lecture on the Silk

Road in East Iranian world. Balkh,

did Zarahustra ever exist? Kushanas,

Greco-Bactrians controlling crossings

from Afghanistan to Kashmir. White

mountains rising above green

pastures, snow under the blue

heaven in bright sunlight. World

in bright colours, and the crumbling

towers on that shore, the sound

of the sea, life rising

among the falling snow on wings,

and here, here tired electric light

and curtains before windows, sound

of coffee machine in the kitchen,

hum of cars from the road,

absence that drives to those

distant world through sounds

and words, escape, escape

this which is not life, this

existence to the myriad lives

opening, branching, reaching

to all directions through time

and space, multiplying, escaping

the confines of single lives.

30.04.2018

A SNAKE ETCHING ITSELF IN THE LANDSCAPE

The river flows black and shallow,

turns and turns, a snake

etching itself ever deeper

in the landscape. It

goes ever on and stays

the same, black water rushing,

foaming at the rapids.

In its bottom secrets

no one seeks, ten thousand

years sinking deeper

in the soil, rocks

so slowly carried

their years as long

as those of the river short.

The river flows,

turns and turns,

and no swimmer or a fisherman

breaks those black currents

flowing, rushing past

the faces that the soil takes

and grinds the bones

like the old mill whose stones

are carved by river alien

to human eyes. Harnessed,

it broke free, the black water

turning, turning, etching

as the people come and

go on its banks, cold

in summer, blazing in winter

cold. A snake etching

itself in the landscape.

27.04.2018

'Antisemitism: how the origins of history’s oldest hatred still hold sway today' (The Conversation UK)

So far do the worshipers of Israel go

that now they claim there was no hate

in the massed ranks of humanity

before Jews emerged and came

to be oppressed and hated. So

naive, flattering view of humankind:

That for two point eight million years

we would have lived

without hating!

Yet we killed all those two point eight million years,

our hominid kin until they were no more,

our sibling branches until they were no more

and ourselves; twelve thousand years

ago we massacred an entire tribe,

but apparently, now we are told,

without hate. Five and half thousand years

ago we sacked and slaughtered Tell Hamoukar

of the high walls, and no one

lived there for centuries. Yet,

now we are told, we did it without hate,

just like those in Tell Hamoukar,

before we closed the siege

massacred the Sumerian outpost before the walls.

All without hate, all our wars

and the cities that went down in flames,

Ilion among them. All the blood

that flowed on the stones and dried on the sand

was shed without hate. Did

we then do it out of love, or

without feeling, until Jews

came along and we finally found

hate inside us, mindless, raging hate?

Or, dear Zionists, was it all along there,

in the blood, marrow and neurons of humanity,

the hate with its many victims

in these two point eight million years?¨

'Antisemite!'

26.04.2018

TIME DIVIDED

I thought it was the good-damn Tuesday but

it was already the blasted Wednesday; oh

well, what does it matter? A day

is a day and in that you stay until

it changes or you

cease. So, a Wednesday. Did

I go out? I don't remember. Perhaps

I did, perhaps it was on Tuesday, the

real Tuesday, the one that came

on its ordered place in the week

and departed, giving way

to the false one, Wednesday;

a day is a day is a... Each

day for a twenty-four hours we

are in Babylon in the land of

the two streams, and

each day is divided into sixty minutes

of slices of Mesopotamia

for us to dwell in. There we

are, moving from one little

box to another, neatly in line and

then, zoom in and

you see us again, now

traversing from one second to

another sixty times in a minute.

You get it? Wave to us,

see us to wave

back to you, us, 

sixty times in a minute,

sixty minutes in an hour

twenty-four hours a day,

just us, waving

to each other,

to ourselves, again.

25.04.2018

NO ESCAPE FROM RECKONING

So, no avenger for Hector but the gods

as a war gets its fitting end:

A babe thrown down from a tower

to ensure that the fate of Ilion

shall not follow its conquerors

over that dark wine sea.

Yet, Fate to which even the gods

are bound by chains of iron,

will see the bones of many men

who now watch the sacrifices on the mounds

of maidens to the dead

not resting in their home soil

but beneath those waves, inviting

in the bloody dark dusk

like a trap ready to be sprung.

25.04.2018

ALL RECEDES

From Thursday to Tuesday

outside once,

ten minutes,

taking the trash

&

collecting the mail.

Curtains across the

windows.

Imagine

there is nothing

but what

is inside

these walls,

what is

in the books

you read

laying on

the mat

waiting

&

waiting

for the wet

nose and

furry paw

that never

comes.

O

life

that it

has

come to this.

Never

again

the three of us

on sofas together

watching the

games on the green grass.

All

but these walls

recedes

like

life.

25.04.2018

GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION ACROSS TIME AND STONE

Red paint

half a kilometer in

from the entrance

to the cave

twenty thousand years

to this moment

in time

and a question

Why

we can make

to which

we can offer

guesses

educated

or less

triangles

rectangles

ovoids

in red paint

twenty thousand years

and half a kilometer

away

We

have all the questions

but none

of the answers

Perhaps

perhaps

they were

all along

questions

25.04.2018

THE MEANING OF DEATH (IN LIFE)

There is a meaning in death

only in life.

In death

there is no meaning.

Death is beyond

life and beyond

cosmos and beyond

everything.

Death erases

all meaning,

everything that was.

Death is what

was before the universe:

Complete absence of everything.

Void is filled with promise.

Death is what void

is to the core of a star.

Only on this side,

one heartbeat

away,

is there meaning for death

and meaning for life

and meaning

for all the words

in this poem.

25.04.2018

O HELIOS

adrift

the great whales

in the depths

rising

the sun setting

burning sea

boat

fire and water

between

sky and deep

the great

star setting

the great whales

rising

o helios

raise us

on back of one

to the corona!

21.04.2018

marek hlasko(1934-1969)

what should

have komeda expected

what else

from a man drinking

his way to ethnically cleansed land

so full of fake angst

like a successful author

with the world open before him

can be

fame and money and respect and women

so drink it all away

go to an ethnically cleansed land

(which one?

both!)

and in one

throw a pole

down a cliff

a fellow pole

with

fame and money and respect and women

down a cliff

drink it all away

with drugs

sleep it all away

sleep away

all away

away

20.04.2018

a bad day to die

this would be

a bad day

to die

because

each day since

has been

too much

to live

a bad day

to die

a bad day

to live

alone

a bad day

to live

& you

dead

all

of

you

dead

20.04.2018

THE MOUNT, THE RIDER AND THE PAGE

On a conservative horse

the fascist rides

and a liberal page

feeds the mount and the rider.

19.04.2018

Silence of the April evening,

light fades, shadows merge;

the colours deepen

towards night

and the absence

is etched in the landscape.

So sorrow

bleeds

from the mind

to the world

and makes it

a monument for its loss.

14.04.2018

Where did the universe come?

From where

your consciousness came

and where it

returns

after you and the cosmos

separate.

12.04.2018

THE DOOR INTO DISTANT SPRING

I am laying on my bed, the door is open -

not to the snow gleaming in sunlight

as a breeze with a hint of spring

moves the drapers - no,

the door is open to a moment

buried deep, deep in the past;

some year long gone had it,

this sweet peace I enjoy.

Enjoying the evening sunlight,

the breeze telling of buds to come

on boughs, of grass and flowers

waiting as seeds, the book

in my hands, Dostoyevsky

and the joy, the joy and ease

I feel that come from the distant

past, the long buried past,

through all these decades,

and I am young and hopeful again,

such a long, long ago,

time folding, personality folding,

part of the boy that was

in the man with gray and white

in his beard, and the book

in my hand is one weft, the Brothers Karamazov,

the breeze with its visions of spring

a second, the evening sunlight a second,

my mind the warp and this

undeserved, unexpected joy a miracle

they make. I am ready to cry,

not of pain or sadness, not

because of all the graves

and all the decades and all the

failed hopes and all the mistakes

that led to the graves, no

I am ready to cry out of happiness,

to be myself once more,

not the one that I made with such

trembling hands at life's loom,

but what I was, before,

the raw material made wrong.

The broken barrier will made itself anew,

time will refold and the folded

personalities will separate; past

and what is today outside this magical sphere

will drift away to their time and space.

The lesser me will be back,

a master of all he wrecked,

the pathetic lord of the ruins.

But the boy will be there,

there in his own time,

in this moment of golden gentle sunlight

and breeze with it soft hints of new grass

and the first small blossoms,

of a life-time of books, reading and writing

and growing up to fill

what promise he held.

10.04.2018

Oh, how I have slept

so long and yet,

awakened, the nightmare persists

still. 

You are gone, and I am here;

still the same

haunted life

I slept to escape.

07.04.2018

YET ANOTHER PRECIPICE

Some nervous energy at the edge

of yet another precipice,

a piteous rush of adrenaline

combine to mistake

yet another leg in the end

for a beginning; hope

is the poison

we can't but drink even

when we know it's hemlock

rushing down our throat. One

disaster after another, this

thing called life. In

the end, in the real end, the

last leg, when we finally

go over the edge

of a precipice in the abyss,

do we even then

comfort ourselves with

false hope, that the

sound of bones breaking

is but a new beginning?

06.04.2018

APOLOGIA FOR MACHINE BREAKERS

What they don't understand, those that mock

or wonder the Luddites, is

that the Luddites had nothing to gain from machines.

They could only lose, and

these later generations of bourgeois wonderers

and mockers

are blind to that fact: Progress

doesn't share its gifts equally;

often it takes without giving for generations.

If you couldn't own machines

they worked against you.

We might keep this in mind

with out robots and drones.

We must. The machines

took jobs, drove down wages - that's why

they were broken. Not because Luddites

were stupid or hidebound or superstitious.

The machines still take jobs

and drive down wages -

and they still benefit the same groups

as then, foremost,

and the fruits of plenty

vanish from our hands.

05.04.2018

ALL THOUGHT BLEEDS TO THE LANDSCAPE

Wind scatters snowflakes

in the silence of an April afternoon;

the trees in naked solitude

stand in line left by men

seeking order in 1972.

Simple geometry, elms in prayer

to the overcast sky

shedding snow. All thought

bleeds to the landscape,

becomes black, gray and brown

and comes back through the senses

and colours all thought. Footprints

in the snow, so slow their burial,

their beginning and end beyond

sight and thus knowledge, falling

of the edge of the mind's map

where it navigates the space-time of the day.

Snowflakes dance in the air,

brainless fairies from the mindless Heaven.

05.04.2018

THE WHITE SKULL GRINS

No Lazarus we,

no man of Nazareth

to cast aside the

touch of rot

and bring back

a thought

where decay moved.

No, no wonder

of life after abyss,

but cold flesh,
ice of death
and then,
the casting away
of the robe of meat
and the skull
grins, white,
to some joke
the universe played
and which death
reveals; mocking
us. The dead
walk again?
No, the dead
walk now,
the billions
in robes of flesh
and hot blood
in their veins
while the white
skull grins
and waits,
beneath the surface
of flesh and thought.

21.03.-05.04.2018

UNTIL THE EARTH WILL WASH MY BONES WITH SPRING MELT

The warmth of the April afternoon has

melted the snow and ice covering the road on deep blue morning

into a watery mush;

I think of your graves, the soil still frozen;

none of this water will reach you, yet.

It's natural, of course; the way it has always been.

It's the coldest of consolations

when there should be no graves, yet.

Death can be accepted when it comes as a mercy

after disease and age has made us children again;

white-haired children looking with eyes

that don't recognize their children,

so desperately seeking their own parents.

Then death is a mercy, natural,

and the soil and the water and the roots of trees,

the life in the loam - it's all natural, and

if not good, the way we came to be, so long ago;

growing and dying like plants, the

animals who stole the fire from the gods

and drove away the night and the beasts.

But now, no.

No.

Great wounds have been driven into the world

and they won't heal to me until

the earth will wash my bones with spring melt.

04.04.2018

LEONARD SORVOJA(1867-1936)

There was later, after you had died,

and decade after decade after you became the soil

you had worked with mindless dedication

on those days when the body remained in the fields

and the man was away,

a damnatio memoriae on your name

and then, from your grandchildren's lips,

two single tales carrying a condemnation,

stains of different sorts on your name.

That above, the man lost

in who knows what distant vision,

and what I will leave off and tell only on my kin,

from dawn to almost dusk on the river-side.

Then the fights you had with your son

as long as you lived, about the real sin,

the civil war and the side to which you cast your lot

when they so nearly killed your son.

It always ended in a fight about the civil war

when the they met, your grand-children said;

until on this day you died:

April 4th 1936

and we put a damnatio memoriae on your name,

the blood in our veins, the marrow

in our bones and the flesh on our bones.

04.04.2018

I GIVE AWAY SOME OF YOUR BOOKS

I give away some of your books;

a bag full of books. Not those

of strong emotional value, not those

that could fetch a price in used books' store;

no, just books that have no worth

beyond the words printed on their page

and the lesser, lingering, connection

they have to you. Your hands

have held them, your fingers

changed their pages. You

have read them, entered their worlds and

they have lived in your minds,

mixed with the thoughts and images of us.

We and the books were, fleetingly,

connected in you. So I give away

part of you, and part of us in you.

People we have never known and never will

will pick them up, read them

to escape their sickness, the fear gnawing

as real as the pain eating them,

and they will enter worlds similar

yet not the same as ours; a multiverse

exists through books, endless variation

co-created with each mind reading them.

Their hands will held them,

their fingers shall change the pages

where your fingers moved them once.

A slight, slight connection

between lives ended and lives

balanced between existence and the void,

or already ending, grasping

at the world slipping away. 

These books of yours I gave away,

a web of connection between mortal minds

and mortal hands, a spider's web

of illness and death, and what

reaches beyond the dying flesh

into some fragile unity of minds,

an immortality beyond individual fate;

culture, the crown of our species, not

some dusty carved heads atop a bookcase,

but the books in the case,

the multiverses, branching through each brain

which before the light goes unites with then,

the collective web woven by humankind

through each live flickering in the cosmic night,

flickering in the wind between the minds.

04.04.2018

GIFTS TO ODIN

every day you should

write a poem

like this

grow the sapling

of your poems

with a new branch and bough

slowly slowly

into a world tree

at the centre of your existence

and when odin comes

seeking wisdom in death

tell him

wisdom only grows

from life roots deep

new bough added each day

cut him a twig

from the foliage

give him leaves from the crown

these in one hand

fill the cup of the other

with pollen

this is all the wisdom

there is

in life from life

02.04.2018

OF THE MORTALITY OF ALL ART

The artist who acknowledges her own mortality,

still believes, wants to believe, tries to believe

in the immortality of her art;

not all of it, of course -

but that some fragment of it, like a zircon

from the Hadean embedded in younger rock,

will be carried through all the coming years,

through aeons of human life and civilization

to endless future, immortal,

and in it, her own essence, a fragment,

a ghost of a thought still whispers

to those who walk on the soil she became.

But this is vanity, vanity and hope

that grows out of deeper understanding

that there is no hope, no immortality,

only extinction of body, mind and all

that it wrought; that all has an end

and once even the faintest echo of us

has ceased to spread throughout time and space.¨

You say: But look at the words of Enheduanna!

Read them!

Hear the Hurrian hymns,

voice the Tale of Sinuhe, see

the murals of Pompeii, exchange

glances with the dead in the Faiyum portraits;

be silent and in awe in Chauves and Lascaux!

But I answer: Enheduanna has spoken

for forty-three centuries; Sinuhe's poet
thirty-seven; the Hurrian hymns

are reaching our ears through thirty-four centuries,

the murals of Pompeii and the Fayum portraits

were made by hands turned to ash and dust of the desert

twenty centuries ago; the great shrines

of our ancestors at Lascaux and Chauves,

in the womb of the Earth, have

been there mere fifteenth and tenth of the life of our species.

What will remain of them in three-hundred-thousand years,

the age of our so wise race?

Stand before the abyss of time,

know that all that you are,

all that you create

are but pebbles thrown in the chasm.

Know that one day

a faint, faint sound will come

of the pebble hitting the bottom,

echoing, fading, dying.

02.04.2018

BEYOND LIES NOTHING

foam

on the surface of spate-time

spawn of the void

human lives

from the void you came

to void you shall return

you were not

you shall not be

you were created by the cosmos

without meaning

the created and the created

existence is all and fleeting

soon you

will be on the precipice

of the void

beyond lies nothing

01.04.2018