THE HEADSTONE

 A brief moment of sunlight
on this day of endings;
when your name is on a stone
above where you are laying,
something has come to an end -
a curtain has fallen, yet
only for the half-time
in this mixed tragedy and
farce. You the tragic victim,

betrayed by one you

trusted and loved,

I the farcical villain,
who bumbling destroys lives,
ends lives - the very lives
he professes, even
to himself, cherish most.

Then, occasional rain
with memories and guilt -
but guilt has never revived
a human being lost, and

in memories you return
only as puppets sculpted
by our subconscious;
the same subconscious
which seeks to absolve
and condemn, and
can not end this fatal farce
or avert yet another
prophesied tragedy - only
my own death can, when

the clown exits the stage,

and leaves behind mere

names on stones.

25.10.2020

SO ADEPT ARE WE AT BREAKING EACH OTHER

Oh humans, so adept are 

we at breaking each other,

willfully blind to the hurt

that makes others crumble,

even when we break

them apart, even when

we break apart.

24.06.2015-23.10.2020-25.10.2020-05.02.2022

#Poem #Poems #Poets

SEVEN YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS

Birdsong in the summer night,

darkness in the autumn night,

the years they took the songs

of birds and human beings,

and this true darkness brought

which, inside us,

devours the seasons,

in shine and gloom alike.

23.06.2013-23.10.2020-25.10.2020

SEE THE FANGS OF TOMORROW CLOSE IN

The future in its

gaping maw holds,

shivering with dread,

the frail, doomed today.

04.05.2013-23.10.2020

THEY ARE DEAD IN US

 Our lost beloved ones
don't live on in us;
they are in us,
dead.

Dead
like the deceased are
when their memory
is not yet dust like lives.

22.10.2020

LAZARUS

What mercy is there in dying twice?

Facing death and its cold oblivion

a second time, with the fear deepened

by memory of the vast nothing

that was between the last heartbeat

and its thunderous renewal,

and made bitter by the knowledge

that no travelling prophet

with his gathered entourage

shall come to raise me a second time

to declare in flesh his mission from God!

20.10.2020

THE DEATH OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE(1540-96)

Francis Drake he shat himself to death

while they were putting him in his armour,

and no wonder they then shut him in a lead coffin

and threw overboard into the depths; no

wine casket for him like Nelson,

no boiling of flesh like Henry V,

not even a heart cut out of his chest,

just the deep blue sea and the devil

rising in a wave to take his own.

18.10.-20.10.2020

THE LAST ASCENT

A climber who never fell,

never had his bones broken

with gravity and stones;

the peaks long conquered and long lost,

had his rope at last cut

when the sky was a blue sea after rain,

climbing the rainbrow bridge,

like a beloved pet he had become,

from the hospice window

to the Alps of the Moon.

20.10.2020

IN THE LATE WINTER DARKNESS

The March night;

in black wastes

the world erased.

01.03.2015-16.10.2020

UBASUTE

1

We came to the mountain

where the wind cries

abandoned elders.

2

Carried to her death,

the old woman still

holds tight her son.

28.02.2013-16.10.2020

NOT QUITE A HAIKU

A short, late spring

birthed a hot May,

summer of bees.

19.05.2013-16.10.2020

FALLEN DEAD THINGS

Broken tooth, fallen leaf.

Both yellow, picked

up from where they fell.

From the bloody sink,

the soaked ground

under the stripping trees.

The bloody gums, the

birch branch they grew

and flew from -

how many shall break

and fall until the snow

comes silent in the night?

05.09.2015-16.10.2020

NO MEANING

A brown leaf falls

on the dark reflection

in the cold water

holding the clouds.

14.10.2020

THE OLD AGE OF W. B. YEATS

 When the man became old
all the old answers wrapped

in flag or dead,

the world stale,

the swans flown,

the beautiful women grandmothers,

and what the old man had

were testicles of apes,
and blueshirt fascists,
to questions of limpness
of organ and mind.

14.10.2020

ALL POETRY IS POLITICAL

There's no poetry that wouldn't be

political to someone;

no escape from the reality

for the frail critic

in search of pure literature,

the essence of experience

untainted by ideology

and views roughly sculpted

by the necessities of life.

Even utter gibberish

can speak of despair

towards world gone mad.

23.06.2013

THE WRITTEN WORD

flowing on the page

dreams and hopes in ink

a lifetime spent

chasing mirages

22.10.2013

AFTER THE STORM

The wind shakes

the trees that remain

after the storm

felled the tall firs,

bending now the

remaining

alders, birches and junipers,

the lone high pine;

not breaking

them,

for now.

14.05.2015-12.10.2020

WHAT HAPPENED

Ripped off their beautiful wings,

ripped off their fragile dreams

of butterfly wings,

after opening the cage

and promising them

the blue, warm air of summer

amidst the flowers in bloom.

22.01.2016-12.10.2020

SIMPLE

If you want respect

from others,

never ask for it.

If it's not given,

never show a sign of it affecting you;

if it's given,

never show a sign of it

either affecting you -

just tell you

owe all to others.

For the best way to

avoid envy is to share,

and to give up is to keep.

02.01.-04.02.2017-12.10.2020

BIBLICAL

Blood for blood.

Such a simple

equation.

Justice paramount

when your shrieking

soul demands.

And wrong

when your opposite

wants it.

It's you who

pierces one's own eyeballs

with a blazing-hot needle.

16.11.2015-12.10.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THUS I HAVE WALKED IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

A morning, an autumn.

Bright sunlight, cold air.

An evening, an autumn,

bright sunlight, cold breeze.

06.09.2017-12.10.2020

AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGMENT

It grows dark early, under the iron-gray sky,

and the wind keeps blowing, taking leaves

off alders and junipers, birches now stripped bare;

cold, quick rain falls on short intervals,

water drips from the eaves, the branches,

and still, there is a flickering light

inside the damp dark of my thoughts,

feeling of happiness on this

early October evening,

as the northern wind rises to a howl

and the soaked land buries

itself in the deepening dark.

09.10.2020

AFTER YOUR DEATH IN VENICE

To Ezra Pound(1885-1972)

Having loved, and written

so much of the southern land,

at your death they should

have salted and taken your corpse

over the winter passes, upstream

into old Burgundy, sealed

it in a tarred cask, hand-crafted,

to remember the good old ways,

and sent you down the river

on the voyage to the sands of Arles,

where at Alyscamps they

could bury you, or let you rot.

09.10.2020

OCTOBER RAIN

Sun started to shine, and I made

to rise from my chair

before the window and the computer,

to go outside -

in the yellow-gray autumn

made golden and silver;

then the rain started to fall,

hard rain amid sunshine,

and I sat back, watched

it fall as the gold

and silver waned,

and the sound of the falling rain

rose, beating thunderously,

as white clouds drifted

against pale blue sky

above the birches.

08.10.2020

THIS AUTUMN LAND

 A shaft of pale sunlight

pierces the thicket of yellow-leaved birches,

rising where often in my eyes still

firs and pines for their hundredth autumn

rise to block the sky,

above paths now overgrown

with devastated years.

08.10.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

A LANDSCAPE IN OCTOBER

In this yellow autumn,

under a milk-gray sky,

I am a fallen leaf, red,

amid the dying weeds

as the cold rain comes.

08.10.2020

PLAYING WITH THE BLUE MARBLE

Snow falls,

rain falls,

a cycle through

a changed December,

snows washed away into

puddles and streams in a soaked land

as the heavy rains come;

up and below zero

temperature fluctuates,

humanity playing

children's games

with a small blue orb

in the endless void.

18.12.2015-08.10.2020

NO FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is never earned,

but always granted

out of mercy for

the undeserving.

But how do you ask for

forgiveness from the shattered

people you broke,

from those entombed?

12.06.2015-08.10.2020

CHICKEN SOUP WITH REMORSE

Awake, sipping watery chicken soup,

perhaps should have added that cream,

a lot less water,

should have made the effort,

rolled from the sofa to the floor,

called, risen to my knees,

shook and awakened,

listened, truly listened,

made a search for symptoms online,

made the fucking call, in time,

and then, not this -

not this purgatory,

not this watery soup

when time has lost all meaning,

and days go down the drain,

down the drain like the lives

we let fall past us our fingers,

our own with them.

31.07.2017-08.10.2020

PLATO

That mere longing for something beautiful,

beautiful and lasting in

a world of loss and decay,

is taken as philosophy

is a condemnation of philosophy.

27.11.2017

OUR PAST FALLS APART

The past is a closed book

with a cracked spine,

falling to pieces

when forced open,

shedding leaves

tumbling, scattering

on today's floor.

18.02.2016-07.10.2020

FALLEN LEAFS

 Like the brown leaves floating
in the muddy pools
amid clouds,
once we
shall, fallen,
be dead things
amidst the earth and the sky.

07.10.2020

THE GOVERNMENT MEN RETURN TO LIGHT

The 59 officials and priests of the 26th dynasty,

raised from their millennial darkness,

their coffins and mummies in bright colours

again among the sands of Saqqara,

and perhaps they would understand -

these were men of the government, after all -

that they are here to bring money

to the ruler's coffins, to hide

the 23 executed who are being put

in their own dark holes in the ground.

06.10.2020

JUST A COMMON AUTUMN MORNING

On this rainy October morning,

looking out of the window

waiting for the coffee to drop,

I'm glad it's a proper autumn day

after the warm red yesterday;

rain and cold wind, brown

leaves falling to puddles 

in the gloom under an overcast sky -

it will be nice to have a brisk walk,

remember all the autumns gone

and get a common flu,

as long as tomorrow

brings back the warm red light

and still air of the Indian Summer.

06.10.2020

KNOW YOURSELF

Such a wretched beast

that can neither live nor die,

only suffocate and watch them perish,

those who loved the parasite,

dooming themselves.

17.09.2018-04.10.2020

BEYOND

A dream about sleeping,

and awake,

ethereal light

denying state of wakefulness,

adrift beyond

states of consciousness,

beyond time.

12.04.2016-04.10.2020

TO THE END OF LIGHT

Under fading suns

at the end of light,

when no stars are born,

let there still live on

the memory of Earth,

in minds still pale blue

orbiting the Sun,

aflame not frozen,

giving birth

to the life then dying.

Let the frantic

descendants seeking

escape to the multiverse

still remember us,

the weak, frail beings of

short lives, who lived

so that they could live

trillions of years of stories

we could never imagine.

16.10.2013-04.10.2020

OCTOBER COLD

Yesterday,

it was summer among the falling leaves,

and I walked the overgrown path in peace with the years

gone; today, the wind and rain under an overcast sky

have brought chill to the autumn day,

and all the dead who should live

are restless in my thoughts.

Their feet should fall on brown leaves,

the cold breeze should fill their lungs,

and their minds with thoughts of the winter coming,

they should turn to us with a faint smile

and say how cold it's today,

and that we should all go back inside

and get some coffee before we all fall ill.

The grey day grows dark,

and the ghosts alive in memories

know they are dead

and know they should live,

and here I sit alone,

drinking coffee in the October cold.

04.10.2020

FOR CLARA

 You were writing for Tibet
when death come;

painless, it was said -

but then they always say that,

and you were alone.

Your dog missing, lost

in the year of

overwhelming death,

and you had told how

hope had left you;

'This world is truly hell',

you wrote. So

much pain and suffering,

so much death

around you

broke your heart,

but to the end

you raised your voice

for Tibet, the chained

land of Snow Lion.

Let the white

mountains and the azure

skies keep in them your echo.

03.10.2020

THEY MUST CONSIDER US POOR INDEED

The robbed tombs of kings and queens

gave us a few bones, some trinkets of gold

and broken pottery.

A line of writing here, a name there.
Everything else stolen long, long ago
by those who have no name now.

Thus the rich robbed the poor,
to send themselves to the life
beyond death in style.

And the poor robbed the tombs,
mutilated the bodies, set them on fire,
and robbed us, we who
   
would like to have a mummy
and a golden mask, treasures
to be put on display.

At least they would have
full stomaches and some fine things,
perhaps, until it came time for them

to die and be put in meager tombs.
And we, we who dig up and salvage
of the past what we can,

we who ride this particular wave
in the churning ocean of time,
leave but little in our graves

for archaeologists of the future
to find and write about.
They must consider us poor indeed.

17.01.2009-02.10.2020

IF ONLY YOU WOULDN'T BE DEAD

Red and golden leaves:

On swaying branches

against the bright blue

autumn sky, on the

warm green grass

and moss, aflame

in cold October light.

01.10.2020

EGOISM OF THE WEAK

 Who do you write for?

(Beyond yourself.)

No one will read it.

Yet:

To whom you breath for?

To whom your heart beats?

Only for yourself.

(Egoism of the weak, existence.)

Only for the sake of another intake of air to your lungs.

Only for the blood to circulate still in your veins.

Only for more thoughts, more words.

(These no one will know.)

Only for yourself.

(You...)

Only for the sake of more time.

More of you.

(Yes, you!)

Spreading your existence across time.

(Your existence!)

It's pointless.

(You think you matter, for yourself.)

But it's something.

(You think you matter if you exist.)

Until it no longer is.

(Until you no longer are.)

No.

01.10.2020