'AMERICANS'

9/11 made me interested about Israel

and Judaism, says

a former Catholic altar boy

turned atheist,

who now uses 'mensch' once

in every one of his podcasts.

Just like his fellow US authors,

who suddenly in 1967

learned three terms,

only three, which

they just had to put

again & again in their works:

Kibbutz, shalom and mazel tov.

Just those three. No more.

Showing the limits of 'American'

interest, even

towards those states

to whom they grant a share

in their 'God-given right'

to unlimited violence

and endless oppression.

29.12.2020

HYPOCRITICAL, SELF-DECLARED LOVERS OF FREEDOM

Don't speak of justice,

don't use the word "freedom",

if you don't stand with

those who are victims of injustice

done by your friends.

09.06.2013

TOOTHACHE

Swollen Moon

on the sky a toothache

made manifest.

23.06.2013-29.12.2020

MINIMALIST POEMS

1

day

die

dark

2

stars

wandering

stars

3

rain

wash

snow

4

december

solstice

sunless

5

gloom

winter

moon

6

window:

november

night

23.12.2020

WHAT MY FATHER SAID

Hope is the cruelest

form of torture of all;

'Tell a man to be executed

that he will go free;

open the cell door,

and then, when

he steps out, shoot

him in the back.'

29.03.2015-21.12.2020

DUBLIN I

Try to help someone,

and if you don't get them killed,

they attach themselves to you

and try to make their life

more important to you

than your own, while

trying to get themselves killed.

And in the distance,

the people you tried to help

the last time, are falling

into pieces because of you.

21.12.2020

THE DESERT HERMIT

The desert called me,

promising with a voice

of a growing sandstorm,

to quash my hunger

with wonders and exuberant sufferings.

I came among the ever-changing,

unchanging dunes,

the crumbling hillsides,

far from the falling world of men,

to where life is a piece of grass

withering between stones,

the footsteps of a lizard

being hidden by sand.

The Moon a white orb

over the undulating hills of sand

on cold nights,

the Sun a blazing presence

that evaporates water,

thought and sin alike.

The two eyes of God.

The promise of long, lone struggles,

with vast visions coming like

lost caravans from the depths

of creation, looming

over sanity. 

09.06.2013

A TASTE OF THE END

The day has passed,

the gray light has seeped

to the ground,

the canopy of clouds

has devoured the unborn stars,

and given us the darkness

that awaits at the end,

when for aeons we shall shiver

beside the black holes,

waiting them to evaporate,

erasing all these dreary

trillions of humans

and their years.

20.12.2020

BOOKS

The main problem

with books are

the authors.

07.08.2016

AUSTERITY

Streetlights

shut down.

Austerity

darkness.

02.10.2017-14.10.2020

ON YOUR BIRTHDAY II

Made it,at the last hour of the day,

one match after another flickering and dying, 

until at last the candle wick catches fire, burning

& something of these years lifts in the dancing

flame, something of you lives on at midnight;

19.12.2020

ON YOUR BIRTHDAY

 I can't even find the matches,

or the damn lighters, to

light the candles.

Darkness then on the grave

that shouldn't exist,

on this of all days.

Like your worries

I discounted, the phone

I didn't see, there on the table.

Apt.

Cursed are those

who beget fools.

17.12.2017

AT THE END OF TIME

Cold was the landscape

of the brief afternoon,

winter white with falling snow;

now, in the long night

beyond the windows,

a void from the end of time,

when the last light

in the universe

has gone out.

16.12.2020

ARIADNE

Give a man a golden thread

to escape the monster and the labyrinth,

and on Naxos' shore you shall find

yourself, gazing on a black sail

in the horizon disappearing -

as in the distance grows a sound

of the approaching entourage

of the drunken god. You,

who saved, shall find no saviour

beyond the stained arms

of the Thracian one, whose

commands make mothers

tear flesh from

their sons' bones.

16.12.2020

A FUNERAL IN THE DIM DECEMBER LIGHT

Now the falling snow

makes a postcard of the landscape,

big, fluffy snowflakes

dropping from the sky,

the autumn buried in its cold grave,

at last; but to whom

could I send this postcard,

with a mourning Christmas song

echoing through the scene?

Before the light has its revelation

the world lives through

its darkest day.

16.12.2020

TRAVELS IN THE HEART OF ASIA

In the end, if Marco Polo

never went past Constantinople,

it matters not; if ibn Battuta

never set foot in India,

it matters not. We

have the books,

we have the maps,

the routes drawn;

we travel them,

sentence by sentence,

footnote by footnote.

If Marco Polo never

went to fabled Cathay,

if Ibn Batutta never

stood tall in the

sultan's court at Delhi,

it matters not; we will.

16.12.2020

HOMECOMING

 Back home, with cats
and memories, with

the dead living

in every square meter

of this house and lot

that is my life;

alone in flesh and human

thought, like one

of those paper-dolls

we cut from magazines

as kids, taken

out from my binding,

crumpled, waiting

for the flame

to leap into ashes.

16.12.2020

AT THE END, AT THE BEGINNING

 Something ends.

The gray morning

covered in powdered snow.

Fear begets

a thousand shivering children;

the future, amidst them?

Hope is the Sun

of remembered skies,

hidden behind the clouds

of the mind,

trying to put to sleep

a thousand shivering children.

Something ends,

in us.

Something has began -

a stranger passing by,

a dark figure,

vanishing down the street?

Or one of the

thousand shivering children,

crying in our limp arms?

Hope is the Moon,

a silver disk

of a biting night,

cutting with the force

of a frozen truth,

shattering 

in reflections.

Something begins

in twice mirrored light.

15.12.2020

PEN IS NOT MIGHTIER THAN A SWORD

Pen is not mightier

than a sword; otherwise

al-Mutanabbi would

have lived and the brigand

fallen under his pen,

not the poet struck by the

highwayman's blade

bled his voice to the sand.

10.12.2020

THE DIFFERENCE

The difference between an average

and a mediocre poet

is that you like the former.

Especially

if you are the poet

yourself.

09.12.2020

FOR THE WANT OF A HERO

In this bleak afternoon, 

twenty minutes from the night or so,

it seems I've managed

a yet another betrayal;

as I shiver sipping coffee,

turning up the heat,

I have to wonder

couldn't the Fate

have chosen a better villain?

If only there would

be a caped hero, with

a mighty jaw and eyes blue

like a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer's,

all these lost, shattered souls

would have been saved

in one triumphant issue

after another.

09.12.2020

HOW THE DAYS DIE

1

No embers of the sun

fading in the horizon

as the overcast sky

in deep gray

mates with the brown,

chill earth,

and begets night.

2

Yesterday died in

robes of gold and amber,

giving herself

to the penetrating dark,

gave birth

to glimmering stars

in their high abodes.

09.12.2020

BEWARE, ELVEN MAIDS, WITH WHOM YOU LAY

That Aragorn,

you have to admit,

was something of a prick:

One day, in his prime

and glory, as king Elessar,

he would announce: 'I will make myself die.

Just felt today it's time to go,

before I become old.'

No thought had Aragorn

for spending more time with his wife,

three thousand years or old so,

to adjust his lady Arwen to widowhood,

and leave last pleasant memories;

no final visit to the glades of Lothlórien, or

Annúminas of north, for her to cherish;

no, Elessar, something of a prick,

was too keen to die.

And his dear wife,

three thousand years old or so,

having given up immortality

and kin for Aragorn -

who was, you have to admit,

something of a prick -

was left a widow and to wander,

until in the autumn woods

poor Arwen would die alone.

08.12.2020

IN THE DYING LIGHT

Half past one, and the blazing Sun

sets fire on the frosty treeline descending,

and in my mind are fighting

the cold amber of the landscape

and you, brought to this moment

by the folding time, from

past years and chill graves,

from frigid exile, memories;

and you win, until the red light

wanes in the nocturnal tide of stars;

an hour I have, grieving.

07.12.2020

JANUARY

Water dripping

from the eaves,

winter melting.

10.01.2015-07.12.2020

FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END, STANDING UNMOVING ON OBLIVION'S GATE

There is no eternity, no life

beyond death; barely a life

when the heart still pumps blood

and the brain gets its oxygen.

This is all there is, this

pointless turmoil in the cage´

of bone and flesh,

in the dance of mating galaxies,

until the dying day of mind

and matter, still burning

amidst the great voids,

both fading; the illusion

of thought, the mirage of eternity.

05.12.2020

A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF RAINER MARIA RILKE'S(1875-1926) 145 YEARS

1875-1926: A parasite.

1926-2020: A dead parasite.

05.12.2020

TO A READER OF RAINER MARIA RILKE(1875-1926)

In the gardens of countesses

he met angels, had visions

of god in palaces of princesses;

there was no place for you

in his art, no place in visions

of heaven, of divine love;

it was all for the nobles

who paid his bills, his entire

art. For our lion of verse

you, a faceless, nameless

one, wouldn't have existed -

except, perhaps, in distant

hell, beyond the sight of nobles

destined to the marble

halls of heavenly Jerusalem,

and the loving embrace

of their heavenly father,

no kin to you. To him,

you who now read his

elegies and sonnets and worse,

you would be less than nothing,

an insect like a liveried servant.

He wouldn't have spat

on you in midst of his reveries

- he wouldn't have noticed

you, at all. In his world,

you wouldn't be. So

why, dear person, do

you keenly read him who

would never sit in a dinner table

with someone like you,

who would never notice

you, when you would serve

to his divine aristocrats?

05.12.2020

DECEMBER DAY

 Gray skies, white
snowflakes

without an end,

from the bleak

morning's pale light

to the bleak, haggard

afternoon's all-engulfing

darkness, devouring

the white landscape,

the gray skies,

the infinite snowflakes.

04.12.2020

DECEMBER AFTERNOON

 Snow falling in the darkening
afternoon, falling

on the past fallen into

ruins, on lesser lives
run to the ground.

Snow falling on the darkening
world, this
world that looks
on ruins of the past
through our lesser lives.

04.12.2020

ON A GRAY DECEMBER MORNING, AFTER SEEING A NIGHTMARE

So, awake,

I pick up Du Fu,

read half a dozen poems;

just another old man

nearing the end,

longing for places and people

left in the past.

02.12.2020

THE WORLD OWES US NOTHING

In the end

the world owes us nothing,

and we owe everything

to the world -

because we are just,

for a brief moment,

part of the world,

and everything we

appear to do to others,

we, in the end,

do for ourselves

as the world.

02.12.2020