THE CHIMES OF GUILT

Everything else can be endured,

but the sound of the conscience's tolling 

is the chime that rushes us to the ending.

25.02.2021

THROUGH THE WINTER DARKNESS

Midnight, and here I shiver,

colder inside my own skin

than on the outside, where

in the darkness the path

I made through

the snow with a shovel

ends before

reaching the road.

23.02.2021

IN THE FINAL GLOOM

 The white day sinks

into a black night.

In the final gloom

I fill a cheap, white

plastic mug again

with hot black coffee,

pouring white milk

make it into a light

brown liquid

with which to flush

the taste of ending

from my mouth.

22.02.2021

AT THE EDGE OF THE RESURRECTION

 At the edge of the forest resurrecting itself

seed by seed, sapling by sapling,

we are stopped; for all the old paths

leading through it, the ones we

so often walked through the decades,

in the shadow of the old evergreens,

are grown over. In their place thickets

of young birches, junipers and willows,

firs and pines, and to carve

a new path would be to put our crushing

feet on that exuberant life,

bursting from the ground towards the

sky, seeking the Sun -

& giving us hope of something

greater than these short existences

in which we, in our fragile

consciousnesses, are

bound into. There is no entrance

which wouldn't be violence.

So we don't force ourselves,

we who are closed out by our nature,

not part of this explosive rebirth,

with only those shadowed paths

in our memories left for us,

as we start to fade

from the landscape.

22.02.2021

THE COLD PLACES OF THE MIND

 The gravestones we cause

are the bitter seeds

of the words we beget

to fill the emptiness they leave;

under the snow now,

not to be seen,

yet tall in every thought -

while our words as cold

as the icicles hanging

from the rafters

of these places

we make as derelict

as the lives we ruin,

before the erecting

of the headstones.

21.02.2021

BEFORE THE DEVOURING VOID

 Soon I will go and lay down on my bed,

afraid of never waking up,

not wanting to face the afternoon

to which I can expect to awaken.

I don't want to taste, in some nightmare,

oblivion, and cease;

I don't want to face

the cost of mistakes I have made.

Yet, I have to face both:

The payment for mistakes I've caused

(in the spiral of failures).

and the moment, transfixed

in fear, before the devouring void.

21.02.2021

A (NOT SO) LITTLE NIGHT POEM

There is nothing to write,

so... I write that. 

But then, after

having written that,

the words spawn

from the mind's pond.

This is a normal night,

after two days

of expensive mistakes.

So... normal.

& I just had a birthday,

on the anniversary

of my grandmother's

death.

I didn't celebrate it.

.

I was concentrating

in making an

expensive mistake.

So, there is that

to write.

Always something

to write about.

Until there is

no one writing.

& No more birthdays.

21.02.2021

FATHER III

 The light above the kitchen sink

flickers on and off,

like a human heart,

and like a human heart,

one day it will fail,

like yours beat its last

in this very room.

18.02.2021

THE NAKED SUN

Just finished re-reading a book

which I twice read in 1990;

thirty years, and something

of that time, at every page,

kept pushing at the veil of time,

a shape of the sheltered life around

that foolish, pathetic boy;

oh yes, he was shy and unhappy

outside his tiny, homely bubble,

yet it was he himself who came

to throw away what he loved

the most, and from life

the most hoped,

all what I long for bitterly.

Somewhere, in those years,

that foolish, pathetic boy -

may he rest unquietly in me -

ended up becoming me.

So life goes, slips

from our finger-tips,

and leaves us, with solitary lives

surrounded by the frigid wastes

of our own making

the cage.

 16.02.2021

THE ENTIRE HUMAN ENDEAVOUR

 All of this is for nothing -

this vain struggle ending

in disappointments;

wasted, an entire life.

Sure it was just a modest promise,

but this? Should've been more

than this wretched state.

Yet, all lives are lived for nothing;

no one creates something

truly lasting.

The great hand of time,

if not that of their fellow human being,

shatters and erases

even what the best of us created.

In the failure of the entire

human enterprise,

in the bitterly warming knowledge,

that none of shall escape

the binding chains of failure,

is the comfort

in which we can wrap us.

15.02.2021

AT THE EARLY DUSK

 This should have ended

a long time ago;

the curtain fell and still

the actor plays for empty seats;

yet as long as it goes on -

why not enjoy the reddish glow

of the setting, cold, Sun

on the branches of

snow-burdened trees,

on the deep banks of snow

covering the dreams we

had and strangled?

15.02.2021

SEEING US TWO AS CHARACTERS FROM BOOKS

 To PRC

Laying on the bed under a blanket,

on this darkening, frigid

winter afternoon,

I read first Asimov, then Spinrad;

how much my existence like that

of the Solarians, how much you

one from the cloating cultura,

deserving an endless wanderjahr,

as I my solitude among the wastes

of this depopulated land.

Such opposites meeting could

only end up harming

the one with the butterfly wings of soul,

not the one whose mind

rejoices in the silence of cold woods,

as the day wanes to starless night.

14.02.2021

AFTER HAVING BEEN BRIEFLY UP AND FALLEN ASLEEP

I awake again as the light has faded

to gray behind the windows.

I get up, disturbing the menagerie of cats

lounging on my bed,

make my way to the unwashed panes;

looking through them,

without my eyeglasses,

it seems it could be snowing,

in that mid-winter landscape

existing in three colours

only: Black, gray and white,

and yet - oddly comforting.

A strange reassurance fills

me as I watch the deepening

gloom, shivering. 

14.02.2021

JUDAS SPEAKS

All our dreams,

buried

in your graves.

14.02.2021

 

REMEMBER

Remember, you are a mortal,

always one heart-beat away

from oblivion; as you began

a new text, write, then,

as if you would never

breath to finish the

first sentence.

13.02.2021

AFTER ALL THE SACRIFICES, THIS

If we die now, it was never

worth it; vast sacrifices

others made, for us,

and we, here, 

not even having

given birth

to intellectual mice. 

Our farce,

their vain tragedy.

13.02.2021

DISAPPOINTMENT

So many paths in life,

and they all led

only to 

us.

13.08.2016-13.02.2021

DIMMING THE SUN

To PRC

Wispy clouds drift across

the face of the cold Sun

on this frigid afternoon of desolation,

just like I once did -

briefly - drift

across your shining, fragile life;

but the clouds on Earthly skies

can never dim the Sun

as I did you:

A dark dust cloud,

from some interstellar waste,

invading your existence.

13.02.2021 

DEATH IN PLAGUE TIMES

Plague times us remind

that societies around hiding

Death revolve; seeing itself as enduring,

immortal, a society puts blinkers

on its drones, forcefully guides

them through their lives -

so that Death, the cruel end,

rarely to them appears;

society makes its mortal drones

believe they shall live and live,

to keep them their waning

days, before the void, labouring,

the replaceable cogs, in the machinery

- rusting and creaking in the Plague times,

when Death appears in its shattering finality

and reveals our drone lives'

utter futility.

13.02.2021

THE CONSTANT THINGS

 The worry and woe never ends

as long as we live; no -

the worry and woe never ends

as long as the Earth

orbits the Sun; no -

the worry and woe never ends

as long as a human being

is alive in the darkening

cosmos of dying red suns,

filled with worry and woe

as we are today.

13.02.2021

THE WINTER TIDE

Azure sky as a waveless sea
stretches above the winterland -
a sea of frozen waves
that has engulfed the wood and field;
something of us was drowned
under this unrelenting frigid tide;
the cold eye of the wintersun,
what was it that was lost
under the undulating white?

13.02.2021

LIGHT ON A COLD FEBRUARY DAY

Light - so much light!

The cold bathes the frozen

landscape in clear, bright,

frigid light, chaste light

that begets no life;

no buds will sprout,

no nests filled,

no grass shall rise -

but what it begets

in our minds!

Such joy, such

unbridled joy!

12.02.2021

IASON

In the end, each of us

shall sleep under the wreck

of our lives, the monument

to what we did at our prime;

we, miserable wretches then, 

seek comfort and protection

from that rotting symbol

of our best deeds.

Yet, it shall be

our doom.

12.02.2021

ASCENSION IN LIGHT

 I am happy

today,

bathing in the

cold February sunlight,

resurrected;

as the snow-cover

undulates across the landscape

so do our lives

over the years,

from the sapphire horizon

to the hoary pine-spires

of the woods.

11.02.2021

IN COLD FEBRUARY

Azure sky

over mid-winter's

burning cold wastes,

which in their bright

whiteness hurt

my eyes -

which belong

to darkness

and the glimmering

stars; this

freezing purity

of existence

carves itself into

me

with chisels of ice.

11.02.2021

I HAVE COME ACROSS THE YEARS AND I HAVE LAID HIM TO REST

 Now this soft light of treasured

days, after I picked up 

from the sawdust of an attic room

a book, lost, whose fate

I had wondered

about for three-and-a-half years;

these moments of Zen clarity

after a great stone of my own

carving had fallen from my

shoulders, on the eve before!

I feel in the soft, bright

sunlight of a cold winter

mid-day the return of lost

days, of myself that

I had mislaid like a book

before a move; I have returned

to which always sustained me,

and taking the book from

the sawdust I have pushed aside

the old and tired man

who did so much harm

to those he loved,

above all else.

He is gone, disappeared

into the light, rest he

in the peace which he denied;

in the spectrum of myself

you seek in vain him.

In the soft February light,

in its burning illusion of warmth

and its cold purity of truth,

there is hope kindling and the

cherished years, long lost like

The Void Captain's Tale,

of a full world once inhabited,

return. In this joy,

which echoes in my flesh

and thought, I have crossed decades

to live, accepting, what remains

of the bright world's promise,

in the serene presence of

the beloved ones.

10.0.2021

COLD WINTER MORNING

The day has dawned in white,

undulating snowscape frozen

under an overcast mirror,

 evergreen trees covered

in snow and frost,

the dark green of pines

approaching black

hidden under cloaks

of heavy white,

bending; around them

whirl in breeze

snowflakes, scions

of the sky seeking landing,

in their unique multitude,

in air of faded glass.

10.02.2021

FROM SPRING TO MID-WINTER

Trees erupted

into foliage

of frosty white.

18.05.2013-10.02.2021

LONGING

To PRC

If I would still have you here,

in this gloom of the cold morning

when my flesh longs for you,

I would rip the clothes off from you,

throw you on the bed,

lick and bite and kiss your tits,

put your feet on my shoulders

and fuck you desperately,

fuck you with all the frustration

of these months,

so hard that the damn bed

would crash under us.

10.02.2021

 

BAD CIRCULATION, COLD SPELL

To PRC

This night my feet

are colder than the Moon,

colder than your chaste,

ivory bosom on

which I yearn

to rest them.

10.02.2021 

TO D. H. LAWRENCE

Running away with an another man's wife

(as dour as that man might've been),

you should not be surprised to find

(let's say in twenty years time),

that the man who was shagging her

(while you were dying)

would throw away your ashes,

when sent by her to bring them home

(where he had been filling her fanny).

Envoy

I would be pretty sympathetic,

both of us being working class lads,

if you wouldn't have been, mate,

such a fucking fascist.

10.02.2021

IF YOU HEAR ME

Now would be good

to go; happy, in peace,

at ease with the years.

Accepting the losses,

what became of life.

Now would be good

to go, to the peace,

to the silence

beyond the ceaseless

flow of time.

09.02.2021

COLD AFTERNOON 3

1
So cold that the distant traffic
echoes even through these old walls;
the sound of the frozen landscape
machines on a slippery road
from the past to the future,
cutting through the lives
stranded on its sides.

2
So cold that the sounds of life,
even if of the rigid, metal kind,
echo through these old walls,
through this life stranded
on the side of a road I so abhorred
in Strugatskys'; the road
that cuts through time
and leaves skeletons
chained on its banks.

09.02.2021

COLD AFTERNOON 2

It's the cold light I can barely bear

in this frigid, frozen moment,

endlessly hovering

atop the white wastes,

a cold, yellow blotch

behind a veil of wispy clouds,

every part of the landscape

bright, cold, slicing

through this life

the light that has no more warm

than a son who wouldn't go

to hear the doctor declare

death to his mother.

09.02.2021 

COLD AFTERNOON 1

Ragged, wispy clouds shroud the Sun,

the sky is the palest blue, the land

undulating in waves of snow and memory,

fading colours of the flag put

atop the blood of 1918,

the sorrows that make up a life,

at its zenith, its nadir.

09.02.2021

ZERO

Just describe

your life,

as it has been:

A zero.

A bloody zero,

covered in the

blood of others,

those who loved,

those who trusted,

all who were

betrayed

by you.

08.02.2021

DU FU

 All that wandering,

in the Yangtze valley,

on the southern lakes -

surely he knew that the goal -

the northern plains of the Yellow River

where, looted, the capitals changed owners -

he wrote in his poems,

was not the true goal to reach,

but an ideal, a dream

in which to garb

the restless travelling

on the southern waters,

the life of an exile

he had come to accept?

That here was his

real home, the currents

of man and nature,

on water and soil,

tumbling towards

that final voyage

up the Xiang.

08.02.2021

ON THE PALM OF MY HAND

 You lived, you struggled,

you died -

and now, in my hand,

as a broken fossil

all that, turned

into minerals

in your tomb of clay;

how many millions

of years your echo

in rock? And now,

I cleaved in two

your memory of stone.

08.02.2021

TO BE A HUMAN IN THIS COSMOS

 From the void we came,

to the void we shall return,

and the void shall erase

the very cosmos

in which we died.

07.02.2021

THE POINTLESS STRUGGLE

 The meaning of life

is existence itself and procreation,

and the former, you know,

is just a flicker and then gone,

and the latter - a doomed

run across generations and species

via aeons, until the pointless struggle

ends with the baryonic matter.

07.02.2021

BELLEROPHON

 If we are lucky to sit on the winged horse,

and ride our way to the heights of gods,

self-aware we must be enough to know,

that one day shall Pegasus throw us off

and we'll fall, broken, amid the mortals,

and yet, knowing this, keep ascending.

07.02.2021

IF I WERE NOT TO WALK ON THE DEAD GRASS OF AUTUMN WHEN THE SPRING COMES

My grandfather was 71, I were 15,

when for some reason we, briefly,

talked about death; mine was not

a family in which things as such

were spoken often. I said

something about wanting to live

forever and ever, and he,

after a moment of silence,

said that sometimes you have

lived long enough, and that

death, he said, can be

something to accept, not

to avoid, when the years

have made you tired. He

lived to be 82, and we

never talked about

it again; and yet, now,

when I am closer to his age

than to that kid of fifteen,

there are moments

when I think I know

what he felt, on brief moments

when I can look at the shining

blue snow in the February sun

and accept, with little regret,

that I might never see

another day like it; or

that after spring rains

I would not be there to walk

on the dead grass and

leaves of the gone autumn,

now slumbering

under that snow.

 

07.02.2021

TOO LATE, ALAS!

1

When we finally come

to understand another human

being, it tends to be too late;

that is the nature of our learning -

we spend our lives gathering

knowledge, and only in the dusk

we start comprehending

the strangers we mistook

as family and friends.

2

We understand the past,

we know what went wrong,

but so often today leads us astray,

until it, too is of the past,

and then, from a distance,

the whole scene emerges,

clear and devastating,

the scale of problems,

the scars running through,

which we never comprehended

from its midst.

06.02.2021

FATHER II

What use is this winter dawn in

its three colours of black, white and gray,

when you are not here

sipping your morning coffee,

talking about how you slept your night;

when the happy-go-lucky dog,

back inside from leaving

her pawprints giddily across the yard,

has not brought with her snow

to melt on the kitchen floor?

What use are these words

I am writing now, these words

lasting a shorter time

than the memory of pawprints

on the freshly fallen snow,

and the shape of you,

still moving, in memories

uniting the decades, across

the room in which you,

four years ago, died?

06.02.2021

THROUGHOUT OUR LIFE, WE DRINK THE WATER OF THE RIVER LETHE

And this day too,

shall pass,

and be no more

in our memories;

all these hours gone,

unlived, before

we go

and are no longer.

04.02.2021

EVERY SELF-MADE MAN IS SUPPORTED BY A HIVE

1

Those who believe

in 'personal responsibility'

(when closely observed)

are only capable to stand

with the help of myriad hands.

2

'Pull yourself up

by your bootstraps'

they say, those who

don't even tie

their own shoelaces.

04.02.2021

PREDESTINATION

The beginning defines the end.

Like the universe, from it's birth,

is racing towards foregone end,

so do we, human beings,

follow a set trajectory in our lives.

From the beginning to the end

we fail through our lives,

trapped by our birth,

the manacles of society,

the chains of genes,

the long line of shadowy figures

disappearing in the mist

of years, our mistakes

echoing their follies.

04.02.2021

THE RETURN OF ODYSSEUS

 When we return to Ithaca,

after twenty years,

twenty long years in war

and on the currents

of the harsh sea,

do we come back

as Odysseus in flesh,

the cunning king,

to his loyal wife and son,

or do we come back

as some companion, who

- in the tale we will tell -

was swallowed by Scylla

or Charybdis,

when it was the king,

who after twenty years

of telling us tales of his life,

describing the

pimple on Penelope's breast,

the scar on Telemachus' thigh,

perished in the monster's mouth?

Yes, do we come back

as a companion equal to his king

in cunning, draping

ourselves with his form and words,

or do we, after twenty years,

twenty long years in war

and on the currents

of the harsh sea,

be as much Odysseus in thought,

as Odysseus the king was,

him living in us,

us dying in him?

Does it matter then,

who comes back,

whose shade wanders

in the gloom of Hades?

Odysseus has

returned to Ithaca.

03.02.2021

THE REALITIES OF LIFE AND DEATH

 They are still telling that fanciful story

about Li Bai, how he drowned

trying to embrace the Moon

on the surface of a river;

but, that is a myth,

a Potemkin's facade raised

before the gloomy realities of life

and death; left to us by his cousin,

of an old man

laying on his death-bed

for weeks, in pain,

before death came

without an embrace by the Moon.

03.02.2021

AT THIS FROZEN MOMENT IN THE BOSOM OF THE NIGHT

 Regret, at this frozen

moment in the bosom of the night,

is a bitter friend, one

who mocks us for

every cherished memory

of those allowed to

slip from our grip

to the greater, abyssal darkness

of death, awaiting.

We let them fall,

them who should be here,

share this frozen

moment in the bosom of the night,

and yearn for the distant shore

of morning, as we yearn

for their faces and voices,

lost to the greater,

abyssal darkness of death.

03.02.2021