ATLANTIS

The dreary gray day is over, the great waves

of the night have sank the hours

remaining in November's last darkness.

We, in our pitiful Atlantis,

in our lightless depths,

live among toppled ruins

of past dreams turned into nightmares.

The feeble morning shall raise us

to meet cold December's iron skies,

the landscape which in snows

reflects our numbed minds' own frosts.

30.11.2020

THE BROKEN PLANET

The wise lower themselves,

for it's easier to see

the world in truth

and it's troubled

crowds from below,

than from above the multitude;

harder to be like the arrogant

lords of the dying planet

in their keeps, to think

yourself separate

from the thronging mass

of suffering humanity.

Necessary to

start the healing

of the broken planet

by throwing

the first stone

and the last stone.

07.06.2015-18.11.2020-30.11.2020

ALMOST

 There are days

when you almost

feel yourself

to be a human

being.

Almost.

30.11.2020

FATAL TIME

No existentialist bravado

will help us to live

with the knowledge

that we are mere ants

in an anthill being

kicked and stamped

on by the

relentless boots

of fatal time.

30.11.2020

TROJAN HORSES

Agamemnon and his fellow warriors,

returning from Troy, shall discover

that the homes they left

can be more dangerous than the foreign land

they turned into bloodied ruins.

Back in the lands which now

see strangers in them,

their homes shall be Trojan horses,

enclosing inside their walls

assassins holding unsheathed daggers,

on their faces masks of the people

the returning warriors left behind.

27.11.2020

NOVEMBER DAY

The day, born grey,

dies grey,

and between, lies

grey upon the

brown, barren land

covered with fallen,

soaked leaves;

an impotent day

that begets

but sour, grey

reflections

on the mirror of

of the human mind.

23.11.2020

PASSING THROUGH PURGATORY ON THE WAY DOWN TO HELL

To PRC

I think of you

in my frigid loneliness,

in this separation

which gives me

visions of your

scared flesh and the

purgatory I unleashed

upon us; in

your mound

of Venus I

see the lonely isle

Dante ascended

on his path

from Hell to Heaven -

but we,

guided by no Virgil,

but my folly,

are descending

to circles of the damned.

20.-23.11.2020

COSMIC HORROR

Simple people

who expect their gods

to be kind and forgiving

must never have beheld with clear eyes

this bleeding world they claim their gods made;

for every sin in human heart,

if divine beings exist,

must have their source in

the greater, fouler sins, of

the malign minds that would've

made DNA out of Earthen clay,

and with hypernovas would now,

across entire galaxies.

extinguish life.

23.11.2020

ON A:S BIRTHDAY

Snow fell on frosty ground

in the gray, bleak light

of the short November day,

and melted,

lies in dark pools

embraced by the starless night.

20.11.2020

CETUS

GJ 3053,

a red dwarf star in the constellation of Cetus,

the Whale, 39 light-years from Earth,

has three planets orbiting it. One,

a Super-Earth almost twice the mass of the Earth,

and in the habitable zone, could have

an ocean hundreds of kilometres in depth.

So says a new study. I think

of immense pressures in lightless depths,

of landless sea swathed in red light,

of my cat I named after the constellation -

one day, over thirty years ago,

brought back by my father,

who, returning from work,

found Cetus dead, run over,

at the crossroad near our home.

I think of my cat, dead in the trunk

of the Lada, I think of those

long gone days when I was young,

when we knew no planet around

other stars, when life held

wonder and promise,

I think of my Cetus,

how he must have suffered.

I think of the immense

depths of the faraway ocean,

the darkness and pressure like death,

the end that awaits

when all wonder and promise

lies dead.

18.11.2020

EMPTINESS AT THE HEART

There is a void, a terrible lack of

universal compassion at the hearts of people;

lives lived with the paradoxical expectation

of global compassion, while having none. 

26.11.2015-18.11.2020

FOR I HAVE ENTERED THE WORLD OF MEN AGAIN

To PRC

Such a bleak, dark day

that barely dawned to gray light

and tones of brown,

and with mind full of worry

of thinking of you, so

far-away, trying to read

about Hobbes and Descartes,

waiting at the dentist;

cold and blind as a mole

on the soaked fields,

thoughts wandering - 

how I would like

to open your legs and taste

you, enter you, but

your soft skin lost, all

I have are Descartes

taken from his Bavarian oven,

shivering before the queen of the Swedes,

Hobbes with his sovereign

tyrant and making a fool

squaring the circle, same

people going pass and forth

in the hallway, again and again,

and beyond the closing and opening

doors, the bleak dark day,

in gray light the ruins of lives.

17.11.2020

FADING RAIN IN THE NOVEMBER NIGHT

Waking up to the sound of fading rain

in the November night, alone

but the cats, and thoughts

a swirl of loss, I pick up Du Fu

and start reading about

his last years amid the southern

waters and crags, wandering,

having lost his northern land,

waiting for the years to close,

until that final crossing

on the Dongting lake.

17.11.2020

FATHER'S DAY II

In the disappearing light

of the chill November Sunday evening

all candle-flames flickering on graves

are cold, frost dancing

ahead the falling night.

09.11.2020

FATHER'S DAY I

 Frost on the graveyard when I come

to your graves, and with most

of you have I walked here to the graves

of those who I never knew;

now I know more here, in the evening

light of November cemetery,

than in this blighted county alive.

Thus is the ending I fashioned

in my long defeat.

In the waning, cold light,

before your names engraved in stones,

I can, with strange calm, confront

the fact more deeply chiselled in

absence, that this is what life

has come into, that this

is the path I carved across years

for its flood-waters, and it

took you in its rushing tide.

09.11.2020

POLITICS AS USUAL

Observe how those

who were silent

on Haiti

are now loud.

But carefully,

notice that.

Support

that can be

withdrawn

at any moment.

29.07.2019

REMEMBER, YOU ARE DYING

Remember, that on

each day

you think you are living,

you are dying.

That last moment

of thought closer,

the end when you

return to nothingness.

From nothingness you

came, to nothingness

you will return,

all these brief days erased.

07.11.2020

CARDINALS(1973) BY YOSHIDA TÕSHI(1911-1995)

On a drab autumn day two

cardinals, red and light brown,

perching on a black branch

amid yellow and dark brown

leaves, bright red rowanberries,

forever.

07.11.2020

THESE DAYS, THEY JUST SPEED PAST

Briefly I awakened to sunlight,

almost eleven a. m., got up, went

to the kitchen, grabbed the phone

charging from the laptop,

send a text message that needed

to be sent, went to the toilet, changed

water in the cats' bowl, gave them food,

came back to kitchen and drank

some distilled juice, and then down

in to the crumpled sheets

again, the mask on the face,

air flowing as I dived

away from the world of light,

surfacing in the darknesss

of six p. m., November night,

black house in a bleak world,

as it should be, the golden

rays a fading memory like

a fairytale half-remembered

from childhood, half

made up.

06.11.2020

UNTIL DUSK

What a fine summer morning,

meadows shrouded in mist

and birdsong, 

as golden sunlight comes

and touches each dew drop;

what a fine summer morning

to close tired, aching eyes

and fall asleep,

dream away the day

until inflaming dusk.

 

20.06.2015-02.11.2020

EQUAL

 Beyond the windows, an Autumn

near November - the withered

season hangs dripping

on bared branches;

inside, winter frost

on each sharp surface

bisecting life, flesh.

29.10.-02.11.2020

MAKE EACH OPEN WOUND A HEALING SCAR

To PRC

We talk, and it ends

all wrong, again;

you asked for an explanation,

once more, and here it is -

I just want to fuck you,

be inside you, hold you,

take you, ram you,

make you scream...

but never, ever

should have you

trusted me, or me myself.

I dream of having you,

open before me,

accepting, welcoming;

of tasting that moist depth

and the smooth flesh...

but the trust that could

send me into you

was shattered, and

only sharp fragments remain

bloody in my hands -

and in your flesh.

Oh how I wish I

could pluck them out,

insert them in me,

make each open wound

a healing scar, and

an eternity rush deep

into you.

29.10.-02.11.2020

WILLIAM WHARTON

 Only people from the United States

are real; from Paris

the quintessential American 

told us

the world a mere mirror

for them to watch

their reflection.

29.10.-02.11.2020

TERMINAL CHILL

October moonlight glittering

on bare fangs; red orbs

of blood falling,

shooting stars of fading

heartbeat.

29.10.-02.11.2020

SYMMETRY HAS LANDED

Snowflakes float slowly

on brown, yellow leaves

covering the soaked

late October land.

I want to be a

seed in your

womb.

29.10.-02.11.2020