I FACED THE PALE DAY

I faced the pale day unwillingly,

its tired white light in a snowscape

where no dog had walked, had

not laid happily atop a snowbank,

refusing to come in, face spread

in a dog's joyful smile, tolerant

of a human folly to be inside

on a mildly cold day like this.

The master in his carpentry

was as absent as his loyal hound.

These harsh absences announced

the thinning of the world;

the magic of the living presence

replaced by a meter of snow

on three graves. In these graves

we are buried, piece by a piece,

never to be whole again.

I faced the pale day unwillingly,

its tired white light not offering

even ghosts, but absences,

absence which the landscape,

silent, without movement, dead,

seemed to scream silently

in it's every part, calling forth

memories of guilt, piercing

like some frozen lance in

a grim fairy-tale no longer told.

31.01.2021

FATHER

1

Your cousin, taken by a gangrene

a month before your own death,

had saved you from drowning

when you had been a little boy;

he pulled you up from the dark

depths of the lake by your hair.

As a youth of twenty, those

big men in their little car -

who you came to think of

somehow supernatural

as nothing was heard of them, afterwards -

came by your crashed car

in the wilderness during night,

having taken, they said,

a wrong turn; they saved

you, except your crushed leg.

My mother, you said,

also saved your life,

ended the wild life

of a working-class bachelor,

hard work five days a week,

hard fun for two days.

You told of the friends

who were dead or in prison,

and believed that was

to be your fate, but for her.

And I, I sent you to your death.

Three chances I had

to save you in those hours,

and each time the chance came

I didn't take it -

and so you died,

thrice saved,

thrice unsaved and doomed

by me.

2

If there would be life

after death,

how could I face you

and those who saved you,

and loved you?

Let there be life

after death

for you

and them,

and for me

nothing but the cold,

frozen earth

of your grave tonight.

29.01.2021

THE DAYS GROW LONGER

The days grow longer, more

hours of pale light showing

the gray clouds and the deep snows

holding the black trees in-between,

trunks rising from the white landscape

against, reaching for, the overcast gray.

There is a message here,

in these faded moments before

the yet long night falls,

pouring in the dark between

the void, and the cold years

separating us, like stars.

26.01.2021

FRANZ SCHUBERT(1797-1831)

Sex kills little mushrooms,

who should follow

their own claim how they

are here, on this fertile earth,

only to compose music.

Little mushrooms shouldn't take

their tubby little forms to lay

upon those who need to pay

with their bodies to live, for all

the things little mushrooms take granted.

Little mushrooms want more

than the fruitful earth allows;

you are here to compose music,

and music you compose, and nothing

more, little mushroom, or else...

Sex kills little mushrooms,

sex ends the one purpose

the little mushrooms have,

to compose music solely,

as they die screaming madly.

26.01.2021

DREAMERS OF THE DIVINE

Have you noticed, dear reader,

how most religious verse on Earth

is not written by the troubled multitude,

desperate in their suffering,

dreaming of Paradise beyond

the mortal coil, but

people living in Heaven on Earth,

rich in all the good things of Life,

fame and wealth and peace of mind,

imagining how they shall

enjoy, beyond death,

still all the good things in Life?

Poetry of the divine

is the realm of those already blessed

while bound in the flesh.

24.01.2021

MY HAND WON'T BLEED WHEN I CRUSH THE GLASS IN MY FIST

How odd that those like him,

these fragile people made of glass,

are so aggressive,

seeking every chance

to launch a wild complaint

easily answered with finality,

by others with a few select words

that would crush them.

Select words they themselves,

freely, hand to us,

explaining how to use them,

asking us to strike,

shatter them

like fragile glass.

It makes no difference

to me what he sends,

what affront of mine

he has made up this time;

these are mere words

and mere words

I'm ready to give him

as crumbs to satisfy;

when I could crush

him with the words he seems to seek,

the that words he seems to yearn for,

playing this pathetic game

with me again and again.

Doesn't he, the little man

ready to be broken,

understand that his petty complaints

don't matter anything at all to me?

That my hand doesn't bleed

when I crush glass in my fist?

That I can crush or absently feed

him, like I would feed a bird on my yard,

crumbs, now and then,

to placate his little ego,

until one day the distance has grown

enough for him to finally

go and immolate himself,

without hurting

those I care for?

Perhaps he does understand

that he has hostages,

perhaps he wants to be

shattered in my fist,

so that the shards

would hurt them,

if not me?

Perhaps he does understand,

that much; let's give

him that much cunning -

yet he doesn't know

this charade costs me nothing,

that in the end I will be there,

saying polite things

over his shattered being,

one more set of crumbs thrown

because I can be magnanimous

with words and beings

I don't care for.

24.01.2021

EQUALITY

Don't worry about how

your story in this life seems to go,

wretched as it may be,

we all know the ending,

it's the same always,

you will get there.

No matter where your path

takes you, no matter how

stumbling through life

all your hopes and dreams

seem to fail, in the end

you will get there.

Nothing in your life did you achieve,

if we don't count the negatives

(but there are plenty of those),

but we all know the ending

is the same for everyone,

death and nothingness.

Others in their fierce struggle

made a name for themselves

written in water and sand and wind,

yet your ending is the same,

we all get but

death and nothingness.

19.01.2021

THE CO(S)MIC RELIEF

What are we for, we human

beings, in this universe?

We think the world a stage

to take our fleeting appearance,

and those moments

much have some deeper

meaning beyond the last

breath taken; that

our words shall echo

through the infinite,

that the cosmic audience

will remember;

but are we not there

as a little comic relief?

Something to lighten

the cosmic opera,

between the blazing unions

of neutron stars & black holes,

the titanic collisions of galaxies

begetting a billion starbirths

as they do their mating dance,

while we little lifeforms

take the stage, and exit

almost as we enter.

18.01.2021

DAYLIGHT

Even the clear

yet muted light 

outside the windows,

the landscape itself in white,

hurts the eyes

accustomed to the darkness

of the night's

protective womb.

01.08.2016-18.01.2021

ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG

Under the withered grass

of the long-gone summer,

better people lie,

and we walk on

the withered grass

in this spring of death,

when again

better people die.

02.05.2020-17.01.2021

JANUARY PASTEL

Deep cold mid-day,

the sky the palest blue

above the snows, merging

in the cloudless horizon.

17.01.2021

FREED FROM THE BOUNDS OF TIME

Art is more real

than the life that creates it,

the dead hand of the sculptor

and the composer,

carving in music and stone

what mere moments

erased from the world;

the model for the painting's

tempting, flush figure -

dust and bones;

what made the poet dream

and write, less

than the headstone with her name;

art has the shimmering

blood of truth, purified

beyond the misery of existence

that marks each mortal,

doomed like no work

that escapes from the

human mind, ever is.

17.01.2021

THE MASTER AND THE PUPIL

Why is it

that every work by Schiele

is imprinted with the

owner's seal by Death,

and that every painting of Klimt

is imprinted with Life, if

only melancholy

in its approaching ending,

yet surviving?

In the master we have Life,

Life before the touch of Death

has poisoned the blood,

in the great follower

we have its end,

death overcoming the watching eyes

burning with decay.

Would twice the years have liberated

art from the erasure

of its mortal creator?

17.01.2021

PRETENTIOUS TO THE END

At the deep blue winter

moment when the day

in cold chill ends &

night in deep gloom begins,

I listen to Bach,

pretentious to the end,

grab Montaigne 

and try to be

the person I once was;

but, alas, that

naive youth too

I betrayed & lost.

16.01.2021

REGRET

When I see life as it truly has been,

all illusions and excuses discarded,

the path I should have taken

across these long, lost years -

it's in the clear, brisk light

of a cold winter afternoon darkening,

too late for anything but grief

in the glooming.

16.01.2021

ALL MY FAULT

What is left of my life?

Dreams, hopes -

all just books

in cardboard boxes,

a degree whose papers

I have lost - and

all the suffering

I caused to others;

the pain in the voices

of the still living,

the snow on the

graves of the dead.

16.01.2021

TOO LATE

The living

were never

enough for me,

compared

to the dead.

So,

the living,

too, died.

&

How I

miss them,

now.

16.01.2021

AT THE LAST HOUR BEFORE NIGHTFALL

The tops of tall pines

bathing in red light

of the January afternoon,

the Sun descended

beyond the darkening

treeline; here, at this

brief, clear moment

near the end,

I still feel a bright,

chill joy expanding

before night's coming.

16.01.2021

WHEN TIME FOLDS

Under this January

afternoon's clear sky,

the snowscape in deeper blue,

treetops still burning

in descending

pale Sun, I feel like living

in years long passed,

where your feet

still left

prints in the now

untouched snow.

16.01.2021

PROXIMA CENTAURI B

 Long, chill years

took me through the abyss

from the dying Earth

to this alien world,

where in eternal twilight

sparse life clings

to near barren strip of land,

between the darkside ice

and the scorched deserts

of the nightside;

this is the planet of last promise

where all begins anew.

Listening to the sounds

of Earth in its death agonies,

coming through the void

and years, I remember

how I spread my wings,

 golden sunlight

bathing them

in Earth's orbit,

clutching in my bosom

the entirety of humankind,

frozen DNA and data alike,

all the millions of years

that made Humanity,

encoded.

I remember,

I who shall birth

humanity anew

from my crèches

to this desolate world,

to bleak existence,

the wreckers of the planet

of plenty resurrected.

I, John von Neumann's AI.

16.01.2021

DUBLIN II

The mentally ill lose their individuality,

become robots going through programming;

that is why they become so angry

when you compare their situation

to that of others suffering the same -

they know that they are no longer individuals,

unique persons, just robots

going through their programming

whose goal is death,

just one more robot in the great

identical mass marching to oblivion.

12.01.2021

THE MEANING OF LIFE

It's in the end all pointless, of course,

this thing we call 'life'

& don't understand;

this stream across time and space

which briefly carries us,

while we ask

these questions 

if time exists,

if life has a meaning,

and is there

existence beyond death?

It's all in the end pointless, of course,

after it has ended, this life -

like the stars and galaxies

carried in the streams

of the great cosmic webbing -

has all its meaning

in existence itself,

whether a wondering mind

in a human brain,

or a spinning spiral wheel of dust

& gas, brilliant in starburst.

08.01.2021

AT TEN IN THE MORNING ON AN EARLY JANUARY DAY

 At ten in the morning,

three colours

make up the landscape.

The clouds and the snow

are blue;

the evergreens black

under their burden

of white.

At ten in the morning,

three colours

make up the landscape.

07.01.2021

2020

 "That", the Devil said,

"was a good year;

a very good year."

"But this, this could

be even better..."

07.01.2021

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS

Paris the shepherd

should have just

eaten that

fucking apple.

But, alas..

So many had to die

for an apple &

his 15 minutes of fame.

Thus are the games

the gods' play:

Buckets of blood

thrown in time's flow.

04.01.2021

THE TOMB OF ACHILLES

What good is a great warrior

without a wretched end,

in some blood-soaked field

that forever will be ruined?

In the Aegean a mound,

on which they butchered a princess,

hides an arrow-tip in a heel,

and a shade half-remembering

how to hold a sword,

and with a vague

yearning for gore.

04.01.2021

JANUARY

January,

roads devoid

of human beings,

landscape

swept clean

in white.

04.01.2014-03.01.2021

AFTER THE FEEDING

Taste of iron

in your mouth,

smear of red

on your lips.

A throat

ripped open:

A crude

second mouth.

You,

a vampire.

05.02.2018-04.01.2021

PRISONERS IN TIME

 Time has put another marker

to separate us, closed

another year, placed

it in its unbroken wall

separating us; am I

the prisoner, as I drift

in the ceaseless flow of time,

or are you the ones,

imprisoned in death's

frozen moments,

which endlessly

reflect you?

01.01.2021