IN THE FINAL WINTER

These latter, bleak

days fall

like crumpled leaves

from the young oak on

the front yard of

my old, true home

fell on the late snows

of winters past,

dead and dry and

on touch falling

into pieces. Thus

the aged branches

of personal time

become bare,

never to carry

buds again.

11.12.2019

LOST

TO P. R. C.

A dim October dusk, sipping

coffee from a thermos I walk

through the bleak

evening weaving night.

Liquid warmth to burn

a freezing flesh and chilled mind

forlornly thinking of you,

flown faraway and lost.

I have the falling dark,

I have the emptiness

left by your leaving,

torn fabric of the world

flapping in the breeze.

I have bitter coffee burning

in my mouth, something

to numb the thoughts

against the falling leaves and snow.

07.10.-10.12.2019

ON THE BRINK

The darkness falls, finally,

the blessed lack of light;

the pale, gray winter light

that still evokes all that is lost;

the darkness more gently

hides that what was

and the ruins of lives remaining

on the brink of the devouring abyss.

10.12.2019

When you have died

you have never lived.

You are not dead,

you never existed.

09.12.2019

You are gone.

You are all gone.

What

am I doing here?

What

am I doing here,

alone?

You are gone,

you are all gone.

Why

am I here?

Why

am I here, still?

Because of sins

and guilt.

Because sins

and guilt

must be

paid for.

09.12.2019

SPLEEN

Gray light and silence

behind the window

where December lives

in absence of movement

and sound. An

impressionist painting

on glass, muted. Let

us forget this hole

in our cage, the

illusion of a world

it offers in three colours.

This is all there is,

these dusty rooms

where the electric light

hurts tired eyes.

09.12.2019

THE BLACK HOLE

Death is what happens

when the world ends.

The core of existence

collapsing into singularity.

No thought shall escape

the event horizon of being.

No white hole shall

provide escape.

09.12.2019

LIVE

Life is what is,

nothing much

but it is.

Death is what

is not anything,

it is nothing.

Live, for something,

these morsel days of ours,

are more than nothing.

In the end,

the end that is everything,

we will be nothing.

07.12.2019

GRAVES OF FLESH AND THOUGHT

We are the grave

of time,

each day buried

in our depth

for life

to move past its losses.

We are tombs

made of flesh and thought;

days and years and decades

hiding in us,

and the people forever

lost in that past in us.

07.12.2019

IN THE DIM GRAY LIGHT OF THE DAY

Another day

of dim gray light,

few hours
spent traversing the waste

between the going

and coming

of the darkness

of the winter night,

between the gray-white

overcast sky

and the white-brown earth.

Worse these hours

than the utter black

of the long starless night,

these cursed hours

gray, white and brown

full of bitter memories

of loss and knowledge

of where the fault lies;

the long night

in its abyssal depths

better hides the truths

the pale, brief day

dredges to its feeble light.

07.12.2019

AFTER THE LIGHT HAS GONE

It becomes easier when the light

has faded

and darkness falls.

It is easier,

in the dark,

to live.

Yet the knowledge, the memories,

they stay there,

in the mind -

always present.

Not shouting, yet

talking, whispering, crying.

In voices lost,

in voices lost

because you were not

worthy of them

that depended

on you.

They who made

their leap of faith,

those who expected,

those who deserved

after decades

of sacrificial love

a modicum of what they gave

to you, year
after year after year,

to you who failed,

who failed them all.

And your own voice

among the others,

self-pitying, crying,

pleading, pathetically.

No longer screaming,

but whispering, the weakling,

in the dark in which

you hide from the pale light,

pale and feeble light

like the blood in your veins,

like the brittle moral spine

long ago broken,

you, long ago broken,

hiding in the dark

from them who
you betrayed.

06.12.2019

NOTHING

Nothing is eternal

except

oblivion.

05.12.2019

ALL THIS

All this

is just a prelude

to the void.

Galaxies, stars

and you, a firefly

in the cosmic night.

All this

is just a prelude

to the void.

05.12.2019

THE VOTERS OF HATE

Those who now embrace fascist racists

are not ignorant, they are not

mislead innocents:

They are as guilty as those

who will with their votes

doom us all.

They embrace hate,

they embrace denial,

they want us all embrace oblivion.

Curse them, these

people who dance with the devil

and their coming excuses

how they supposedly didn't know,

when we all, we all

know what the sons and daughters of Adolf sell.

They shall not be forgiven,

they deserve no pity,

for they are with open eyes destroying us all.

05.12.2019

THE MIRAGE

It's the mirage of

from which you

seek comfort:

That what you create,

in thought, steel and flesh

will survive your end.

It is a mirage

that you embrace

in your desperation;

you know,

you know very well

that nothing,

nothing you have done

and placed in the

quicksand of existence

will survive

your death.

05.12.2019

ALPHA AND OMEGA

The days that we gain strength

from, the long days beyond

our consciousness' reach,

when we are not and the world remains -

do they really exist?

Is the hope that we can't share

hope at all, are the days

we can't live days that really are?

Island universes of thought,

bound in mortal flesh inside caves of bone,

what hope to us if what we distort

in our mind lives beyond its annihilation?

02.12.2019

RILKE

In the gardens of countesses angels

came to him in visions,

and belief in god flowed in his verses;

but when cancer spread across

his flesh and bones,

angels, god and verses streamed no more

and silence came before death.

25.-26.10.2019

DECEMBER NIGHT

the deep elemental black

of a december night

has warmth

which the

brief pale gray

day lacks

like heated oil

waiting

to burst

into flames

16.12.2013-18.10.2019

october morning

morning

no dawn

of pale embers

in the horizon

burning

just cars

migrating

in small herds

in the black

night lasting

18.10.2019

OCTOBER MORNING

To P. R. C.

Another bleak morning of gray light,

wretched to be awake

to greet this drizzling dawn

drinking warmed up bitter coffee

alone with the cats, you

gone and lost to silence,

the dreams of the long sleep ended

filled with the longed-for dead

and their now unremembered words

erased by the surfacing

from the abyssal realm of slumber

to this ashen, watery morn, this

what goes as the reality

and is a purgatory for the

half-damned burning in their sins.

17.10.2019

THE POET AND THE BADGER

In memoriam Edward Thomas(1878-1917)

They dug out and killed the badger

in the dark and ancient combe,

they killed the poet

on the chalk plateau at Arras,

shot him in the chest there

where men hid in the ground

like badgers to escape death.

16.10.2019

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

DEATH IN WINTER

Day spend in bed reading,

drifting through an alien winter;

day spend in mourning

people and mistakes

that kill and estrange people;

day spend drinking coffee

black as the night and the mind,

day spend with closed curtains

to hide from the gray light and the dark.

Day and life, life and day alike.

16.10.2019

JUST LIVE THIS DAY

You shall not live forever,

you shall not die today -

put aside your sorrows,

do not look beyond today,

just live this day

without watching past.

The days without you

will be without end,

the world beyond the wall

of death shall not exist

more to you than you to it.

So just live, live this day.

16.10.2019

BUBBLES IN THE VOID

Our life a bubble soon to burst,

our cosmos a bubble in the multiverse

- a child's soap bubble floating

in the air has same reality

as the galaxy clusters, universes

sprouting, growing, dying.

Forget it, live, embrace

the illusion. Escape

until the bubble bursts.

15.10.2019

DIDN'T GO

I cancelled, didn't go - why should I

take that long walk there and back

just to hear pointless talk

from lips behind which

no knowledge of this exists?

Just an absolute vacuum of solutions.

It's a theatre of the absurd, a charade

worthy of Beckett and Ionesco

and so forth, a facade acted out

so that all can go on pretending

- except you, who flew away.

And for what?

So I laid on the bed in your scent,

with the cats on my side,

surfed the web until slept

again till night had fallen,

awakened from seeing their

dead faces alive again,

and it was dark, the pale light

of the brown and gray day

no longer whispering

of what should have been

and what was not done.

Purgatory of the starless autumn

night had engulfed the hell of

the bleak October day

and already I cursed the weak,

pointless dawn to come.

15.10.2019

october

birches

have but few

bright yellow leaves

left

beside the firs and pines

dark in the pale light

of autumn

05.10.2014-14.10.2019

ONE

Still like a fallen leaf,

more brown than yellow,

on the cold ground

waiting for the rain to come.

08.10.2014-14.10.2019

IRONY

Criticizing North Korea's regime

for lack of liberty while behind

her hangs the flag of the

Confederate States of America.

26.10.2017-13.10.2019

WHERE?

To P. R. C.

Gone silent like a hand of a goddess

would have taken you

during the flight over the dark ocean

and raised in the heavens

a star bright yet lost

in the galaxy's glow,

looking down

upon the desolate grief.

11.10.2019

JASON

An old man, a beach bum

beside a ship coming apart,

a fallen hero on the desolate shore,

a myth ending in a lesson.

'Stop when you are winning'

- or you end up sleeping

under a ramshackle boat,

with your murdered children

long in their graves.

How many were there?

Two or was it four,

send to the Hadean gloom

by their mother's hand?

What could this dishevelled man,

for whom Medeia dismembered

her own brother, answer

before his death

by Argo's decay?

'To win is about not

knowing when to stop,

reaching for one more thing

until none are left to gain - or lose.'

11.10.2019

A BLEAK ISLAND OF LIGHT

To P. R. C.

There is the darkness of an

October night behind the windows,

the drawn curtains.

You are not here, so why

leave this bleak island of light

in the autumn dark,

to go in the breeze and the rain,

walk those desolate lanes

when you are not here?

There is no purpose, no goal

left, so here among the books

I lie on the bed; the blanket

and the pillow still have your scent,

a lingering phantom

for a single sense, your fragrance. 

There might be nothing

in the darkness

beyond this bleak island of light.

I wish.

09.10.2019

AFTER ISSA

Our world just

a mote of dust

in the Milky Way,

our galaxy just

a mote of dust

in the Cosmos,

and yet... a mote

of dust our world

of billions of beings,

our wandering

star of five billion years,

a mote of dust.

07.10.2019

THINKING OF YOU

To P. R. C.

In the gloom of an October dusk,

walking through the bleak

evening weaving night.

Coffee from a paper mug to warm

a chilled mind thinking of you,

flown faraway and lost.

I have the falling dark, I have the emptiness

left by your leaving, torn fabric of the world

flapping in the breeze.

I have bitter old coffee burning

in my mouth, something to numb the thoughts

against the falling leaves and snow.

07.10.2019

ALONE, FACING THE NIGHT

To P. R. C.

1

You have gone, flown

to the sad, distant spring

and here, alone, I face

the falling snow and the dark.

2

When you came, you said

I have so many dreams.

When we made that final trip,

you said: Haven't you done enough already?

and I saw them all, like delicate ornaments,

broken in my hands, your dreams.

3

I miss that girl who came here,

I said, in a moment of desperation

between the arrival in winter

and the departure as winter came.

I miss her too, you answered,

and that was worse than any cursing word.

4

A winter night

now encloses me,

but more than from the chill

I quake from your distant silence.

05.10.2019

BALLADE, BALLATA

To Ezra Pound(1885-1972)

Everytime I read

the words 'Ballade', 'Ballata'

from you, I wish

I could make you ballast

- but alas! You are dead,

you are dead, you old Fascist

and your 'Ballade', 'Ballata'

sadly endure...

01.10.2019

THE NIGHT HAS FALLEN

To P. R. C.

The night has fallen, a starless night

cradled by unbroken clouds;

what hope of morning to come

in the bosom of the night, now

that you are leaving me,

that you are leaving me in anger?

The night has fallen, a starless night

under unbroken clouds;

what hope I have of light of day,

what hope I have now

in the bosom of the night,

as you are leaving me alone?

The night surrounds me,

a night devoid of stars;

the night surrounds me,

a night soon devoid of you.

I fear the morning shall never come,

I fear the light of the pale, broken day.

01.10.2019

at the fountainhead of creation

the secret of the universe

is that there is no secret

just questions

without answers

28.09.2019

cut off from existence

we are unable to differentiate

the world from ourselves

but the world is quite capable

of differentiating us from it

when we die

28.09.2019

nothing

to an individual human being

there is no practical difference

between the end of the world

and their own death -

and after their death,

no other kind of difference either

as there is nothing

beyond death

no world
in which their life
would have been weaved in
to continue in some form

28.09.2019

AT THE END

At the end, when all is soon over

but for the long dusk

before the night falls,

I am drawn back

to those books that once,

decades and decades ago,

drew me on to foolish dreams

of a vague future of accomplishments

- a mirage of life worth living

that died a coward's death in retreat

to bastions of childhood, keeps

that couldn't have stood

what the world threw on their aged walls,

even if not betrayed from within

by the same blind fear;

embers in the twilight,

these printed memories,

set to to turn to ash.

It was not all in vain, no

- it was worse: The world

that cradled me, the loving

people that sheltered me,

gone in the flood waters

of my shattering mistakes,

drowned in endless silence

as I pathetically hid

in the memories of what I

degrared, betrayed

and destroyed.

27.09.2019