AFTER READING A POEM 'I HAVE NOT LIVED' BY A LATE PROFESSOR OF THE VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

There is a brand of man

who loudly claims 'I have not lived'

no matter what path

his life took; from love

to war and fatherhood and loss,

through toil and fame

he might've gone -

yet he claims 'I have not lived'

because life to him

should always be something more

and different. He

is the man waiting for a miracle

when living amongst wonder.

20.03.2019

THE BAYONETS OF WORDS

In each book we read

we find a slice of ourselves,

a revelation given

to explorers

who, in some distant land

to be named after them,

they suddenly see

their own reflection

on a pool under a roaring waterfall

or on the surface

of a still lake;

they traveled far

to discover a glimpse of themselves,

we read and in our solitude thought

are pierced

with revelations and forgotten memories

of our lives and selves.

17.03.2019

A WORLD OF ILLUSIONS ON A LATE WINTER'S MORNING

The wind throws the newly fallen snow up in the air like a child

in the mind of the human being who once was that child

and now gives the wind and the lost child a new life

together, united, the force of nature and the memory

buried in the flesh of a person too old

to let that child go free except in the guise of a winter's

cold breeze, throwing snow and laughing in the howling,

the mind weaving the two together as brief existence

as the wind and the snow, soon gone the way of Villon's

snow of last year, this brain that remembers

the child and Ovid on his bleak shore of exile

going through his own metamorphosis; we,

the brief figments of nature, brief illusions

captured to flesh and blood and bone and thought

in a universe that came from and returns to nothingness.

In our own illusions we see the illusion we are.

17.03.2019

ON THE SHORE

the moon, cold

pale disk in torn cloud-shrouds

between skeleton-fingers of bare trees

on a late winter night

sky a wasteland in

the brightness of its stolen /

gifted light; a mirror

for minds, sailing

above us here at the bottom

of the ocean of air we

fishes arisen from our primordial

home and dreaming of a greater sea

to leave behind, vast

emptiness to be the background

of our flying

beyond the bounds of mortal gravity

that bind us to

the fossil fate of our gilled matriarchs

and patriarchs of the salty womb

17.03.2019

WAITING TO JOIN YOU

We have to go, one day we have to go

and join you, join you who have left

us here in this, in this foyer where we

wait, wait for the door to open and let

us come to you, come to you

and then, then - will you be there,

will you be there waiting for us,

waiting for us or shall we stand,

shall we stand there in the desolation

beyond, in the desolation beyond

alone, all alone, all alone still...?

15.03.2019

It comes suddenly, that feeling of ground

suddenly vanishing from beneath the feet,

collapsing on floor in as dignified manner

as possible to avoid fainting, while the mind asks

"Is this it? Will it be my time, like it was theirs?"

Two days in a row, knowing the beginning

while not tasting the end, the world withdrawing

and enclosing in darkness like on those days

where the existence bloomed suddenly

after all sensory experiences and thought had ceased;

one day it shall not,

it shall not, and there will be the question,

again, and the answer will be death...

13.03.2019

SURVIVAL IN NUMBERS

Better to die standing than live on your knees,

said Emiliano Zapata, better

to live one year as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb

goes the adage, yet

if all decent human beings stand tall

and live like lions for the sake of humanity

and our planet Earth, 

then no chest needs to be pierced by bullets,

no limbs nailed to crosses.

11.03.2019

CHICAGO: A FRAGMENT

...and we talk of the Swede Carl

Sandburg's Chicago,

two hundred murders a year

on streets where trams, trains and horses

and a few thousand cars

crawled forth in a sea of European immigrants;

not one in four third-generation

in the great crossroad town

of rivers and railroads, dreaming

of endless growth, the emporium

of the West on the shore of its own Sea

and the future... Upton Sinclair's

Jungle where men and beasts

mingled in blood and the bloodiest

beasts climbed the skyscrapers

to the heaven of power long before Al

Capone with his syphilis wrecked body and mind

came along, not the cause

but a symptom, a parasite on a gargantuan Leviathan

gasping on the shore of its sea

it devoured with new neighbourhoods,

more museums and army garrisons to make money safe

from those that toiled for it, City Beautiful

for men in smoky rooms, long mustaches and long beards,

their tentacles running like their great Haussmannian boulevards

along the canyons where like sick and defouled river

the masses ran and were run over by cars, trams, trains and horses

and the power of the men looking down from their Olympian heights,

seeing nothing of the weary, dirty ants they

crushed with one step of their collective greed....

08.03.2019

ON THE CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS

This is the simple,

complex tragedy

of human relationships:

Around us people

we want to change

to fit our needs

wanting us to

remain changeless.

We claim gods

made us out of clay

so that we could

shape people in our

potter's wheel

and we claim

gods fired our clay

to keep people

unchanging,

uneroded by time.

08.03.2019

SUOMENLINNA

The Sun glitters on the waves

of the Baltic, a ferry

frozen near the horizon

a silhouette in black.

The old ramparts, empty,

rise in near solitude

as wind blowing from the sea

scatters snow in the air.

Something approaching

joy worms its way

through the sorrow

to the centre of thoughts.

How pure would be

the moment if I could nurture

and relish that feeling;

but it's joy lost too far in time.

You are dead, you that made

life fully a life are dead,

and so close

the silence, one step away.

The waves come heavy

and sluggish to the icy

shore, sluggish like

life ebbing away.

Yet like the bushes on the cliffs

the mind and the flesh

cling to this hollowed existence,

fearing the great darkness beneath.

07.03.2019