YOUR LIFE IS A MONUMENT

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822): Ozymandias(1818)

1

Your life is a monument

to your mistakes, whose

malign influence, across

the generations, shall

long last its fall;

yes, built hastily,

from bad materials,

with little planning;

nevertheless, it suffices.

After all, its fall is near.

2

The monument is gone,

but the lone and levels sands

are littered with white bones,

in each of them the marrow

of your long failure.

31.12.2022

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WE EXIST IN THE EYE OF TIME

The fate of everything

we do and build

is to perish

in the eye of time.

Remember, one day

even of the great pyramids of Giza

only grains of sand

will remain.

And of you, dust.

30.12.2022

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ALL IN VAIN

A flood of words,

now streaming abundant,

will still leave behind it

a drought, and all

the poetical fish will be

left struggling to breath

on hardening mud.

30.12.2022

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WHY WE DON'T RESURRECT THE GLORY OF ANTIQUITY

 We don't restore the Parthenon

and the pyramids of Giza

(more than we already have)

because to us ruins

are authenticity -

what their builders

would have considered

sheer madness.

29.-30.12.2022

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HELLAS

Broken columns

rising from green grass

against gray mountains,

azure sky, reaching

for the golden disk

of the Sun, hung

in the looming depths.

30.12.2022

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OUT OF EDEN

Corrupt beings, the natural

longings of our flesh denied,

distorted, by our fertile intellect,

turned into hideous step-children

of the sinless flesh.

25.(?)-30.12.2022

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THE INSTICTS ARE PURE

The flesh is strong, but

the mind is weak; it lives

through a thousand corrupting

dreams, and with years

stains the innocent flesh.

30.12.2022

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THIS ABYSSAL OCEAN

 All these words

are pointless,

as is the habit

of words,

as is the habit

of human beings,

yet words are

anchors whose launching

is an act of comfort,

even when sailing

an ocean whose floor

is beyond reach

of any anchor,

any mind.

30.12.2022

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SOME OTHER ME

To PRC  

If I but could have you

on my arms tonight,

your flesh to warm

my faltering fire...

Yet for that embrace

I would've to have

been a better man, and

you a luckier woman,

and the actual man

writing a mere phantom

at the end of a path that

was left untrodden.

30.12.2022

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MAKE THE STRUGGLE WORTH ITSELF

So often what we yearn

for we won't gain

until it's but pointless

chaff on the cooling ashes

of our long-held passion.

30.12.2022

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STAR MAKER

Reading Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker

in the light of a plastic Christmas tree,

one that has lost much of its decorations

to cats felling it with the dedication

of loggers, yet still sparkles in blue,

green, red and pink light sprinkled

like nebulae on the spiral arms

of the Milky Way, I'm in that

ambiguous mood of mine, where

curious wonder and abject ennui share

the mind with a polite nod to each other;

our fate to live in such a universe

of marvels he transcribed, yet

also one where minds like his,

that briefly reach for understanding

of the cosmos and our destiny alike,

grabbing some morsel of knowledge,

 in the end fall like Christmas trees at

the touch of blind, uncaring forces.

30.12.2022

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DORA

The deaf old white cat,

now in her seventeeth year

in a world gone silent,

cries her uncertainty

with the voice of

a human baby.

30.12.2022

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OUR EXISTENCE

Foam on a gravelly shore,

itself eroding with

each slow wave arriving

from the shadowy main.

30.12.2022

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MY CONFESSION

All my life I have

kindled illusions

and carried out

craven betrayals.

See the people

that have passed

through my life,

see my victims...

30.12.2022

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YOU SHOULD JUST GO INSIDE

Life is spent in the foyer

expecting the call to step

into the thronged halls,

but in the end we are

politely asked to leave,

while others take our place.

30.12.2022

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THIS NIGHT OF ILLNESS

The dead are weaved

into each train of thought

dangling through this

fever night, the lost

pieces of which I'm built.

30.12.2022

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TRANSCENDENT

The girdle of

the Milky Way hungs

open across the ripe

celestial body,

open the robe of

shimmering dust,

glimmering stars,

ascend into creation.

25.(?) - 28.12.2022

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LUNA

The ivory disk

of the Moon hung

on the ebony deep

of the long Night,

casting a shroud of light

veiling the Stars

embedded in the cold fathoms

of time-devouring space.

25.(?) - 28.12.2022

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WINTER DAY

the pale day

a cold emptiness

separating night's

abyssal fathoms

an iceflow floating

on the deep hours

of darkness

28.12.2022

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IN THE MANNER OF ODIN

These long nights,

subterranean travels

into what was once

the 'soul' are now

what goes as existence;

between gray, pale light

engulfed in the waters

of memory, comforting

and cold in the truth

their still darkling

waters mirror

inside us, the truth

whose seeds are growing

the tree in which we

are hanging.

28.12.2022

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THE CAPITALIST MORALITY

Capitalists complain about

other people's greed and envy,

like their entire society

wouldn't run on those

two fuels.

28.12.2022

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS

All the promise I once had

I still hold, but buried

under a cairn of mistakes,

built with my own hands.

Each day I say to myself,

"Today I will start the great work

to dig up what I still hold,

and make the best of it."

Yet each day I add a new

stone, cut and roughly hewn,

atop the cairn with my

own calloused hands.

28.12.2022

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THE IHRA DEFINITIONS

To the European Commission

To oppose Apartheid is to be antisemitic,

to oppose military occupation is to be antisemitic,

to support one democratic state is to be antisemitic,

to oppose ethnic cleansing is to be antisemitic,

to oppose massacres is to be antisemitic,

to oppose torture is to be antisemitic,

to oppose imprisonment without charge

or trial is to be antisemitic.

26.12.2022

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IN THE DESERT OF OUR EXISTENCE

Some of us have internal

fountains of renewal

that never dry up

in all their long years;

and others among us

endlessly wander

from empty cisterns to

wells that draw no water.

26.12.2022

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IN THE STILL DARK OF THE NIGHT

Hark, listen to the night,

its great silence!

Have you ever heard

a more tremendous sound?

26.12.2022

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ACROSS A LIFE OF STARLESS NIGHTS

 In the great, deep shelters of the night

I am lost, for who could yearn for

the pale morning, a sliver of the Sun,

when the comforting darkness

embraces like a second skin,

and silence has brought an end

to the faltering arc of time?

26.12.2022

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BESTIALITY

 The goddesses of Greece and Rome

never came to mate with men

in the form of beasts;

or, perhaps, there never was

a man left living

after they had sated

their lust in claw and tusk

and serrated teeth

on flesh and marrow.

26.12.2022

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AFTER THE FALL

We are not fallen angels,

nor clay with a divine spark,

but apes just out of the trees,

trying to drag ourselves

up from the mud in which

we fell when we slipped

on our bough.

25.12.2022

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NORDIC ZIONISM

The words 'Palestine',

'Palestinians' and 'occupation'

are not mentioned

when Finnish television news

report about Christmas

in Bethlehem.

25.12.2022

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GREAT WINGS BEATING

Cold is the wind of

the freezing winter night,

biting to flesh and bone;

a chilling gale

rising from the starless void

beyond the glittering

stars and life.

30.11.2020-25.12.2022

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WHEN YOU GAIN THE FAVOUR OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE, WHAT DO YOU ASK FOR?

Paris, the fool,

just asked for Helen

and fame, when even

his cousin Anchises

had gained access

to Aphrodite's divine

vulva and vagina.

25.12.2022

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AFTER WINTER SOLSTICE

The days are growing longer

like Zeno's turtle escaping Achilles.

25.12.2022

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AND I DIDN'T USE THE SWORD ON YOUR KNOT

 To PRC

People are walking

contradictions, entangled

in paradoxes, and

always looking for

an Alexander who

would cut their

Gordian Knot.

25.12.2022

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JOYCE KILMER(1886-1918)

Like befits a man

who wrote some much

about what only God

can do, he was

killed by a man.

25.12.2022

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ABOUT WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

What would William Shakespeare,

the Bard, be writing

if alive now? Same as then,

mostly soap operas,

with the occasional sonnet.

24.12.2022

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KULTUR

 Is there not a German thing

we call art or high culture -

a poem, a piece of music,

a painting or an equestrian statue,

in which a seed of the

Porajmos and the Holocaust

didn't linger, dormant,

until came the Austrian

head-gardener with

his many assistants,

giving water and nutriens

a plenty for these seeds

beyond counting, laying

ready in the fertile soil

of the German psyche?

23.12.2022

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END OF THE WORLD AND THE ELECTRICITY BILL

Sound of rain

throughout the night

on the day before

the Christmas eve;

I should be

worried, the planet

wrecked, and I am;

but part of me

just thinks how this

helps me to pay

the electricity bill,

able to turn

heating off.

23.12.2022

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IN THE BITTER MIDWINTER

Sometimes we catch a glimpse

of the person we should have

been, the one that patiently

waited inside us, a mere cocoon,

for their inevitable emergence;

but something went wrong, 

and they withered, and they

died, inside us. Yet, in that

glimpse of an alternate existence,

softly bitter and oddly comforting,

they are in their full, casual

glory, clothed in a life worth

living, gracefully gifting us

an almost understanding

smile as we part.

23.12.2022

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KARMA IS A BITCH

What did those Provencal 

troubadours of ancient fame do

to deserve Ezra Pound?

Did they burn villages, spear

peasants, rape nubile maidens,

raid monasteries, or what?

Whatever it was, terrible

it must have been...

22.12.2022

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WHO IS LIVING, WHO IS DEAD?

Marooned in space and time,

the living,

the dead, 

all in the many-folded cloth

of existence. 

21.-22.12.2022

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IN EXILE

The past is a different country,

and today we are refugees,

exiled from our native home

into a distant, foreign land.

21.-22.12.2022

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DON'T BE LIKE ME, LIVE

They were,

I am but not 

when you read this,

and you,

a butterfly

flittering in time,

remember to live

for the one brief, shining

moment given to you.

For so soon

you are like us,

echoes from the dead.

21.12.2022

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SENSE OF WONDER

A shooting star

is not an omen

of anything,

except of

the imminent end

of a grain of dust

and its

billion-year journey.

21.12.2022

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YET WE EMBRACE IT

That stars glimmering above a grave,

sky reflected on a pool beside the cemetery,

flowers brought to die before the headstone,

somehow make something beautiful,

consoling, out of the death of others,

is a misguided folly, mere

lies for our own comfort.

21.12.2022

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ON SOME CENTRAL ASIAN COINS OF THE HUNS

A few weathered coins, changing

hands longer than the realm

that minted them, gives us

the names and faces of the

horselords of windswept steppes

briefly made lords of cities, long

since tumbled into hills of sand,

and adherents of alien gods,

whose followers knew not

their strange names.

19.12.2022

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IN THIS MORTAL COSMOS

The bright stars, appearing eternal

across the night skies of our

brief, shooting star lives,

seem to whisper, without malice,

how soon there will be just

them, and the landscape,

and our absence unfelt.

Yet even the stars die, and

planets burn to a cinder, in

their own torment of mortality.

For we are all transient

in this mortal Cosmos.

15.-19.12.2022

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I WILL GO TO THE COLD LAND

I will go to the cold land

with the departing Moon,

no longer shall I gaze

at the burning dawn.

I will go to the cold land

beyond sleep and remembrance;

no longer shall my thoughts

flitter with the light.

There, in the cold land

where the Moon dwells

forever eclipsing the disk of the Sun,

my restless mind will cease,

as a pond freezing to the bottom

ends the restless movements

of the darting fish, carrying them

eternally in its shimmering ice.

19.12.2022

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FOR YOU ARE ALL TRANSIENT

Seek comfort, now, in the

depths of the winter night's sky,

when the clouds and the Moon

don't chaperone the cold beauty

of the distant and remembered stars;

you stand here, in their cool presence,

like you stood those decades ago, on

this same spot, with a long dead

dog, more interested in the scents

on the snow than in the sparks

set in the firmament. Seek

comfort, for soon you, too, are

gone; gone like the beloved dog

and the aged man who sat in light

behind those now dark windows.

Soon there will be just the stars

and the landscape, whispering.

Yet even the stars die, and

planets burn to a cinder, in

their own torment of mortality.

For you are all transient.

15.12.2022

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COMFORT IN FAILURE

Even if, and that's a big if,

you would have done something

positive with your life,

beaten the odds, been someone,

and all the rest, nothing

of it would you still take

past the last heartbeat,

nothing of it would still last

where hearts still go beating

when yours beats no more.

15.12.2022

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EMBRACE IT

Bitterness is best

when spiced with regret,

and left just too long to cook

in the mind's oven.

15.12.2022

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A WINTER SANDWICH

The gray and white day,

a vertical slice of time

and landscape,

a meagre filling,

between the long

winter night that was,

and the long winter

night to come.

15.12.2022

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ABOUT AN AUTISTIC BOY

To be able to love people

as they are, as human beings,

and not based on the attributes

most of us give to them

to  fit them into neat

compartments in our minds, 

into our expectation and prejudices,

is a gift. In a better world

it would be seen as natural,

 the way we all should be.

07.12.2022

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SURFACING FROM THE ABYSS

Awakening, it's dark

still, again; and all

the pale hours

of the day were born

and died while I

swam the deep, dim

waters of sleep,

the rim of death.

06.12.2022

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DUSK

The horizon burns red, dying

embers of the Sun that escaped

my sight; now beyond the

snow-crested trees,

only its light, like

shed blood,

remains.

05.12.2022

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MIRROR, MIRROR WHO IS THE CRUELEST OF THEM ALL?

Would it have been so hard

to accept to be nothing,

and let others have

something?

Is it better now

that they are dead

or shattered, and you,

you still have nothing?

05.12.2022

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MY MIRAGES

I

 It's not that nothing

in this world

was meant for me,

it's that I reached

for them anyway,

and others paid

for these mirages of mine

with their happiness

and their lives.

That spawned the pain

which wrecks

these worthless days.

If only I would have

stept aside and left them be,

but wishes are my mirages.

II

I should have remembered

the knowledge I once had,

and faced the rising tide,

let it come and others live,

let them live and be,

not pay for mirages of mine.

I should, I should,

but wanted an another role,

not be the meek who stands aside,

and so others paid,

and pain now wrecks

my worthless days.

I wish I would

have left them be,

but wishes are my mirages.

III

Let others live,

and let the tide

come,

don't be a thief

of their hope,

step aside,

let them sail

with dreams intact

to some other,

better fate,

never wasting

a thought

for you,

facing the tide

alone.

05.12.2022

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