THE ONLY HAPPY DEATH

The only

happy death

is the one

we never

see coming.

Just lights

out.

We might

as well

win big

in lottery.

31.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

SOUND OF THE AUTUMN NIGHT

   In the warm,

soft night

the sound

of running water,

days of cold rain

in the ditches

now flowing.

28.08.2021

#Poem #Poetry #Poems

IN THE BLACK AUTUMN NIGHT

  A warm night, pitch black,

unseen leaves rustling in the dark;

after days of cold rain,

this early autumn

suddenly easier to bear

after a one sentence message

from you, the one I lost.

27.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

FAHRENHEIT 451

 Re-reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

with a pile of books on the bed,

beside the dogs and the cats;

thinking how the library of Assurbanipal

burned to preserve in hardened clay

words that on paper turn to ash.

Bought that very book from an airport

flying to a country now gone like Assyria,

seen libraries in Yugoslavia gone up in flames.

What will remain of our digital words?

26-27.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THE LEAST READ

In Hell

the only poetry available

is modern 

verse dramas,

even if Heaven

claims their

authors.

29.07.2019-26.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

TO MY WIFE

If I could live

my life again,

I would not be like those

who would change nothing;

I would keep the graves

undug, I would make

sure you would be

here, and my dick

in your pussy.

24.-26.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THESE BLEAK DAYS

  A bleak, grey morn.

Like yesterday.

And the day

before.

I'm just missing

you, wanting

you, lusting

for you.

A bleak, grey morn.

I'm just missing

you, wanting you,

lusting for you.

24.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

WATER CLOUDS

 Whole day on the edge of rain,

but not a drop, yet in the

dim puddles the clouds'

water on the earth

reflects itself.

24.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

COLD NIGHT

Cold night, rain,

drinking coffee,

numb mentally,

following besieged Gaza Strip

being bombed,

watching explosions,

reading about a little girl

asking an uncle to turn bombs off,

drinking coffee,

cold night, rain.

24.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AUTUMN NIGHT

The night has no starlight,

but it has rain, constant rain,

droplets falling, like

little stars made of liquid

would be hammering

the roof, asking

to be let in

from the dark. 

24.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

HIS QUICK RETURN

The old cat

which jumping ran

into the warm, dim

August afternoon,

comes back with

the first droplets

falling in the

deepening gloom.

21.08.2021

#Poet #Poetry #Poems

THESE POINTLESS MOMENTS IN TIME

  All has been,

and all will be,

in vain.

That is

the truth of existence,

futility.

19.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

FADING TO BLACK

 At the end,

there will be no

words,

just the unsolved

mystery,

without answers.

19.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AFTER THE DOWNPOUR

The rain ends as I

run out of coffee,

the white clouds and

the blue sky

dregs at the

bottom of

a fractured mug.

19.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

GLOBE MASTERS AT THE KABUL AIRPORT

 The Americans don't bother to stop

the take-off of the C-17 Globemaster,

not for the sake of desperate Afghan people

hanging to the side of the plane,

just accelerate down the runway,

 climb up to the sky and fly away,

leaving small black dots

falling between

heaven and earth.

15.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

KABUL FALLS

 So they fly away

to their lives

and future wars,

the Americans,

their little helpers,

and the elites,

and the people,

the Afghan people,

the women and the girls

foremost,

they too fly,

into a nightmare.

15.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AFTER BRIEF SUNLIGHT ON THE AUGUST MORNING

A light drizzle turns into a hard,

beating rain in the morning

gloom, ten minutes of insistent

water nails being hammered

in the earth and the pane

and the roof, and then,

silence, and in the northwest,

a second, pale dawn

starts to flood the landscape.

15.08.2021

FATIGUE

Through the sieve of the

still green foliage

of young birches and willows,

the enervated light

of the evening Sun,

descending.

13.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

GREEN WAVES

Green waves

under blue depths,

wind in the early evening

dances with the rising forest.

13.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AFGHANISTAN

After F. Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940)  

They are careless people, the Americans,

they smash up things and people

and then retreat back into their

American Dream or their vast

carelessness or whatever it is

that keeps them going as they do,

and leave other people

to clean up the mess

they have made, or suffer

the consequences.

13.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

DEATH IS NOT SLEEP

  Death is not sleep,

for what makes sleep

what it is, is not

falling asleep,

but awakening

to life.

13.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AFTER SOCRATES

 Time condemns us all

to drink the bitter

draught of hemlock.

13.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

EVENTIDE II

The evening's warmth

is that of summer's

under the fading blue,

yet its silence

and long shadows

are autumn's,

and the weary light

is that of things ending.

12.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AS THE NIGHT COMES

In the waiting silence

I will find myself,

a fading spark

in the dusk

deepening to night.

12.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

OUR FIREFLY DAYS

 Our life is just one in a chain of lives,

and our death will be just one

in a chain of deaths,

and what little hope

is granted to us is that the chain of

deaths will never break,

keeping the chain of life

going on and on and on,

long after our firefly days

and our butterly times

are dust and ash

orbiting a cooling white dwarf.

11.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THE RAT IN MY BRAIN

Suddenly, after re-heating yesterday's old rice

with meatballs in sauce and having eaten them

drinking cups of black coffee, it hits me:

The blood test this morning.

I hadn't forgotten it,

but somehow I had forgotten that

I could just drink a cup of water

with my meds and avoid

everything else.

How many times

I have done these tests?

Two times in the last two months alone;

I should know, and I did, but something

had happened, disconnected the connections

between these bits of information

I was holding in my mind.

I know what it is.

Age gnawing my brain

like a rat gnaws cables.

11.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AUTUMN DAWN, SUMMER MORNING

 Suddenly light floods

the landscape of morning,

the foliage of clouds having withered;

the gray autumn turns into a golden

summer under a pale blue sky,

and the elms and the alders and the oak,

young as I'm old, shine in their green.

But the tall old birch, like me,

still lives in its fall

amidst the resurgent summer.

11.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

WRITTEN AFTER READING JOHN HOLLANDER'S(1929-2013) 'LATE AUGUST ON THE LIDO'

At least the United States is over,

with a million deaths counting

and fascism's iron collar around

its neck only loosened, for now.

At least the United States is over,

the always broken dream, finally 

shattered, million shards cutting

its flesh, spikes in the iron collar.

At least the United States is over,

the Big Lie of four centuries dead

and the truth in mass graves and

neo- Jim Crow a biblical plague.

At least the United States is over,

burning forests the funeral pyres

of the City Upon The Hill, ashes

the American Dream in the dusk.

At least the United States is over,

Uncle Sam, an old chud with his

Blue Lives Matter -flag & AR-15,

tightening the spiked iron collar.

11.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

TSAVO LIONS

 God is a lion in the night,

wrote H. G. Wells

when people were still afraid

of great beasts

lurking in the darkness

beyond their fading fires,

and the shadows of the great beasts

loomed as supernatural beings.

Now, bathing in artificial light

and hiding the stars,

we have cast a greater darkness

upon the world,

and in that darkness

we have become the Tsavo Lions,

terrorizing mother Gaia

and its creatures.

29.10.2017-10.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

ON A NIGHT WALK

Starless night,

the blue-black

August crispness

on my face.

05.-08.08.2021

IN THE CLOUDY AUGUST NIGHT

Only the warmth of

the night air

tells that in

the darkness

around me

it's still summer,

its late days.

08.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

DAY AND NIGHT

1

Each day, born

from cold stars and dew, 

shimmering in the dawn,

will, after the merging

of the long shadows,

be the grave of its

own existence

under the evening star.

2

The dusk,

giving birth to night,

opens the Milky Way's

deep, dusty road

across the long,

quiet hours,

sleep like

the birthing waters.

06.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

EVENTIDE

I awake into the evening,

into long shadows

and bright spears of sunbeams

in retreat.

Hours have gone,

where everything shall drain

when the long sleep of life

gives away to final silence.

But now, in the warm

sunlight, amid growing

shadows uniting,

thoughts like insects swarming.

One coming moment

there will be winter dark,

with no gray day arriving,

and the restless swarm in repose.

04.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AUTUMN II

In the long grass

golden leaves,

fallen, like

the Sun,

caught

in the distant

tree-line.

03.08.2021 

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THE AUTUMN SKIES

Kneel, extend your finger

and touch the sky,

its clouds,

in the dim mirror

of the puddle.

03.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

GOLDEN LEAVES

Golden leaves

in the whirlwind wind,

droplets of paint

fallen from

the tip of a brush.

03.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

AUTUMN I

 It's again the season

of bright leaves

floating

in dim pools

reflecting

darker skies.

03.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

DID HIS EQUALLY LEARNED FRIENDS

Did his equally learned friends,

in high places themselves

as court officials, leading

bureaucrats, officers and abbots,

ever react to Wang Wei's claims,

in his finely wrought poems,

of being a poor hermit, living

in his hut, one with the nature,

with the same exasperation

as I, or at least sighed and

smiled tolerantly; or

were they all in it, in this

game of pretending to be poor

and living in the countryside

with the work of your own hands,

like the king and queen in

later Versailles, facing

its own coming cataclysm?

02.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

THIS PENULTIMATE SHORE

 Violet clouds frozen

in the still light sky,

ground dark,

growing darker,

the web of the night

being spun

from the long dusk

of the August day,

and on this penultimate

shore of existence

I gaze at clouds

whose rims

are still touched

by the rays

of the departed sun;

like the dead

whose lives

still echo in mine,

recarving grief.

01.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

EVER THE EGOIST

August first,

and leaves falling in a cascade

from the big birch in the front-yard;

thunder in the far distance,

and as random raindrops fall

from the violet clouds,

the hot days of June and July

are a dead memory like you,

dim reflections in a puddle;

tired, and almost past caring,

I can't but see myself

in the tree encountering

its early autumn.

01.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

IN THE DUSK

In the dusk chill winds blow,

over the darkened willows' edge

black the tall pine rises,

memory of the old forest felled.

Comes a brooding shadow, fox,

silently through the years' long grass,

long grass hiding the stones gathered

by your departed, calloused hands.

It shall rain cold all through

the short night's midsummer gloom,

the morning in birdsong shivering

over hare's blood in golden light.

14.06.-01.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

WALKING THE DOGS

The first night of August,

the landscape black forms

embedded in darkest blue;

in the cool night air

breath condensates

in the flashlight's beam,

and suddenly the feeling

of Autumn, its long nights

of black depths bridging

days of gray light.

01.08.2021

#Poem #Poems #Poetry