PANDORA'S BOX

The feelings you

keep inside

are a Pandora's box.

Be careful

who you allow open

it, how much

they will let out,

what they will leave

inside,

what they will

put inside.

28.06.2025

SO I DRINK MY COFFEE

I'm drinking the last mugs of June

coffee in the gloom of the summer night,

never again shall I live these days,

little will I remember of them,

but there will be words

I will barely remember writing,

own and adopted, there

will be posts cried into the aether

until some algorithm decides

I'm a bot and erases

all the dead and wounded

I spend these days sharing.

So many years like this

and never enough time

to write or share

what would need to be shared.

So I drink my coffee,

and will turn to verse

and broken bodies.

30.06.2025

EVEN IN SUCH TIMES AS THESE

It's easy to be healthy

and stand tall

when one has such

an inspirer

as his muse,

even in such times

as these, even

as in such times

as these, it's easy

to be healthy

and stand tall

when one has

such a muse.

30.06.2025

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FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA

The land is running out of soil

on which to bury the shrouded bodies,

the hundreds of thousands dead,

the land is running out of soil

to nurture the lives stolen

into rebirth as the land itself.

The land is running out of soil,

the walls and the fences must break,

the land must be whole

to embrace and nurture its dead,

the hundreds of thousands dead,

into rebirth as the restored land itself.

30.06.2025

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FOR ISMAIL AL-HATTAB AND FRANS AL-SALMI, KILLED BY ISRAEL TODAY

They killed the photographer

and they killed the artist,

the genocidaires killed them,

the hands that captured

and illustrated the slaughter

and the joys and defiance

among the ruins

are broken and covered

in shrouds.

Ismail al-Hattab is dead,

his last photograph taken.

Frans al-Salmi is dead,

her last image painted.

And they killed thirty-one others

or forty (the numbers

change so often now

as the wounded die)

with the photographer and the artist,

and the yard is full of shrouded bodies,

the yard is full of stolen lives

and the land is full of hasty graves.

30.06.2025

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A UNIQUE DAY, INFINITE REFLECTIONS

There is no free will

and this day has taken place

exactly the same

again and again and again,

and with slight alterations

from the scale of the atoms

to the path of a raindrop,

but still, forget all that;

this is the only time

this version of me

with this consciousness

experiences these hours

for the first and the last time,

those other other infinite

reflections in a multiverse

without end and no

known beginning

are not me,

so we all think

at this particular moment.

29.06.2025

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"DEATH TO THE IDF"

Israel is bombing Gaza City heavily,

forcing tens of thousands of escape the bombardment,

two hundred dead in two days,

and in the United Kingdom,

the press and the politicians are upset

because a musician got his audience

to chant "Death to the IDF"

at Glastonbury, police

is demanded to intervene

while the Royal Air Force's plane

guides Israeli occupation forces'

murderous attacks,

the Butcher's Apron present

at yet another slaughter of the innocent.

29.06.2025

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SAME SHARED VISION

We can dream and live

more fully in our dreams,

casting away the binding chains,

closing the dividing space,

asleep or awake

stepping in the same shared vision.

27.-29.06.2025

THE MIND REFLECTING

Day's turmoil over, the late evening

in its serenity shows nothing

of what came before,

the incessant rain, the wind,

the dim hours that were their stage;

light blue skies, lingering sunlight

and bright green undulating land

and the mind reflecting.

29.06.2025

PRIVILEGE

I have been on the computer for almost ten hours.

Not much. Not compared to yesterday.

I have made posts, reposted, argued

while bombs fell and artillery shells fell

and people died, and occasionally

I went and wrote a poem

or a translated one. My privilege,

for the bombs and artillery shells

fell elsewhere, and I had the privilege

of deciding when to give attention

and when to look away, forget

that the bombs and the artillery shells

were falling on human beings,

dozens killed while I was on my computer,

posting, reposting, arguing

and writing poems and translating poems.

But now I will make my last pot of coffee,

soon I will put music on, take a book,

and while I read my book

and drink my coffee

listening to music,

the bombs will still be falling,

houses will crumble

and tents will burst in flames

and dozens,

dozens of people

will die while I read my book

and sleep my long sleep.

29.06.2025

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ENJOY YOUR LIFE

Time runs faster

than Mercury

with wings in his ankles,

our years quick as the voyage

of his planet around Sol

moving in its

galactic year orbit,

so enjoy your life,

the passing dream

that we are.

05.-09.-28.06.2025

WHAT HIS MIND SEEKS

Such crude thoughts,

dear muse, such

carnal thoughts,

that mind seeks

to made manifest

in its lusty visions

that have you

in their centre,

oh how they centre you,

and in what positions!

28.06.2025

THE MOSAIC FLOOR AT AL-BUREIJ, DISCOVERED IN 2022 BY SALMAN AL-NABAHIN AND HIS SON AHMAD

The mosaic survived for one and a half thousand years

in Palestine's Gaza, underground,

but after its discovery it survived just two years

before the Israeli occupation forces

bombarded and bulldozed the site

at the al-Bureij refugee camp.

Israel does our dirty work,

said German Chancellor Merz

when the Israeli regime attacked Iran,

one of those people who believe

in the "Western Civilization"

and severe iconoclasm, apparently.

Israel put up a military base

at the site of the ancient port of Anthedon

after bombing the site,

and it was just self-defence

by Israel of itself and its citizens

if we ask another German,

European Union Commission president

Ursula von der Leyen,

who made phonecall to wanted war criminal

Benyamin Netanyahu

to declare her support to his regime,

and keeps talking about "European Values"(TM).

28.06.2025

AT THE END OF THE SUMMER DAY

Gathering clouds prophesy rain

from the entrails of the sacrificed Sun;

they grow ominous, a self-fulfilling

divination, while the Sun

is being reborn beyond the horizon,

in the West among the dead.

Soon the rain will wash away

all but the spilled blood

on our screens.

28.06.2025

THE IMPUNITY OF EVIL

Israel commits massacres

day after day

in occupied Palestine's Gaza Strip

because its allowed to.

No reason for us to speak

about banality of evil,

we can just speak

about the impunity of evil.

The Tik-Tok and Telegram videos

show the banality of evil,

recorded by

the genocidaires themselves.

28.06.2025

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MASSACRE AT AL-TUFFAH NEIGHBOURHOOD IN ISRAELI OCCUPIED PALESTINE'S GAZA STRIP

In a single attack at al-Tuffah

neighbourhood today in Gaza

Israel's occupation forces killed

at least 20 people;

two bloodied children,

survivors for twenty months,

are carried dead

side by side

from this life,

from the circles of Hell

the world allows Israel's regime

to keep up in Gaza Strip.

28.06.2025

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TO HIS MUSE

Going through her

visual gifts

yet again, as always,

as always,

he gets hard,

and as always,

as always

he yearns for more

(how could he not?),

while grateful,

grateful beyond words

to her 

for making him

day after day,

week after week,

month after month

this horny.

One shouldn't complain,

be greedy,

in a world

filled with adverts

promising cure

for impotence.

It's the one thing

she proves each day

he has no problem with.

28.06.2025

EACH DAY, EACH DAY

Such joyful torment,

such joyful torment

one must be grateful

for in verse and image,

you bring, muse,

each day, 

each day.

Sunshine or rain,

you harden the longing

flesh feels and the mind

tries to imprint

in these words,

these words

that fail to embody

what an image

must complete.

28.06.2025

A LATE JUNE EVENING

The clouds play a game

with the Sun,

and the landscape

dims, brightens

and dims again

as the long hours

of the dwindling June

evening stream past

to eternity's shore.

28.06.2025

A LONG DISTANCE ENTANGLEMENT

Let's be like particles,

a long distance entanglement

in which distance can't separate,

and, connected,

one acts and another feels

flesh and mind.

27.-28.06.2025

BEFORE SLEEP ON AN OVERCAST MORNING

In the white morning

scattered songs, chirping

of birds

and soon the long silence

of empty nests

and migrations,

chill autumn when the leaves

fall into dark pools.

In what we have

we see what we will lose.

28.06.2025

THE 555 AID SEEKERS MURDERED IN GAZA

Daily massacres of people

desperate for food

have been 'normalized',

made 'acceptable',

and thus nothing has to be done,

according to politicians and journalists,

it's like rain pooling,

the blood of the 555 murdered

for those who decide

what matters and don't.

25.-26.06.2025

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AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED, FOR ME

How many hours have I slept?

The gray light

is the same as when I

stretched down on the sofa,

nothing has changed

beyond the windows,

same milky-gray clouds,

rain just ended

or waiting to begin anew.

It could have been an hour

or ten or fifteen,

this could be the late afternoon,

the evening or the morning -

this gray light excludes nothing

but the deepest night.

The clock on the wall

has long since stopped moving

its hands, pointing

at some moment that passed

unnoticed by me, like

all the ones that passed

while I slept. 

So I turn to the phone,

charging in the kitchen,

turn it on and return

to defined time,

to its ordered streaming movement,

looking at the numbers

on the screen: o6:31.

I have slept some sixteen hours.

And nothing has changed,

for me, while hundreds

have been murdered

in the conflicts of which I try

to shout when I am awake.

People whose names

I might know wait

to announce their deaths,

their last moments

bleeding on gravel or asphalt

or hospital floor,

while the indifferent world

sleeps on its sofa

the dreamless sleep of the one

who knows it won't awaken

trying to breath under rubble

after an explosion.

26.06.2025

MASSACRE BY ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION FORCES IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE'S GAZA ON A FOOD DISTRIBUTION SIDE RUN BY US MERCENARIES

60 people massacred, lured

with food and slaughtered.

300 wounded and left to bleed,

for those who lure hungry people

with food and murder them

for Zionism and laughs

have made sure the few remaining hospitals

have little to save those

on whose hungry, maimed bodies

a heart still beats. And this

but one day of carnage

in a chain of similar days.

17.-25.06.2025

THE DAILY FOOD MASSACRES IN GAZA BY ISRAELI OCCUPATION

Daily massacres of people desperate for food

has been 'normalized', made 'acceptable',

and thus nothing has to be done

according to politicians and journalists,

it's like rain pooling, the blood of 555 murdered

for those who decide what matters and don't.

25.06.2025

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BACK AT HOME

Rain and wind, clouds

the sky over,

fourteen degrees, feels

colder, evokes

old memories

from decades past,

standing among

fells on some day

more imagined

than remembered,

distilled from

separate memories.

25.06.2025

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A VISION OF HER

He has to call her

among the unfinished

lines from his thoughts

that once aroused,

and full of desire,

shall not let him finish

giving words of the dead

a ghostly life

until she sways

on his lap

for a brief eternity.

17.06.2025

HE COMPARES HER TO A ROSE

A rose is sweet,

yet the hand

that tends the rose

is sweeter still,

and the stem

may be slim,

but her shape

offers more

for the gaze,

and when the petals

fall, withered

is the rose,

but when her robe

falls blossoms

her beauty and our desire.

17.06.2025

AN ISRAELI EXPLAINS SHE CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE TO DESERVE THIS

One doesn't know whether to cry or laugh

when people are upset that missiles

are falling down into Israel. It's like

watching Allied bombing of Germany

in 1943 or so and thinking

that Germany should be left in peace,

or defended. To quote the Israeli

regime officials themselves,

the Israelis can always rise up

and overthrow their rulers.

16.-17.06.2025

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NOCTURNAL SOUNDSCAPE

Suddenly the sound of raindrops falling

comes, the leisurely sound

of what the mind makes out to be a shower,

imagining raindrops falling leisurely

on leaves dark in the night,

turning into a torrent of water

as the coming sound increases,

rain hammering grass and leaf

water rushing down, pooling black

like gathering the essence of night

in the vision mind weaves.

16.06.2025

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FAILING TO FIND A POETIC RESPONSE TO A SKEET ABOUT THE POPE'S VISIT TO HIS NATIVE CITY

He was trying to find some poem

to comment on the pope's visit to his native

city, and with almost three hundred popes

and anti-popes one could expect

there to be appropriate verses

to be found easily, but no -

Robert Browning had one fine

until the ambiguous last line,

Karol Wojtyla another one second

thought ruled out, words of youth

cast in another light what would come

when he was cast on an another stage.

They had seeds of doubt

as have blossomed in our minds

and doubt had no place here,

one sought some

clear statement the past art refused to give,

like all of what had been

would have rested on as unfirm ground

as today, the same schisms of thought

in a merely different robe.

16.06.2025

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ON A NIGHT NEAR THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER

Dark evening turning short white night,

and the height of summer

almost here, and soon the days

shall shorten

in our long fall to another spring.

Nothing of it here, now,

of that thinning

but the mind in the flowering

of things always sees past

to the withering.

16.06.2025

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TO SIDNEY KEYES(1922-1943)

Slain promise, blossoming

but not yet in full flowering

when torn and trampled,

one of the tens of millions

whose decades were stolen

with lead, gas and fire,

all that was to come

unmade, dreaming brains dead

matter a in cooling corpse,

their tongues silent, their

eyes unseeing, their fingers

unmoving that touched

lover's skin and held a pen

composing love letters,

poems, grocery lists, songs,

birthday greetings, last

messages expecting death,

waiting death, as now,

as now, each day now

all that was to come

unmade, in the youth

whose promise will never

be but promise, withering

in the grave, you die again.

09.06.2025

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NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY WHAT APARTHEID ISRAEL'S GENOCIDAL REGIME IS DOING TO OCCUPIED PALESTINIANS

Nothing that came before or after

October 7th 2023 matters, so we are told

by the genocidal Apartheid regime

and its zealot supporters,

except the Holocaust,

these the two pillars

on which genocide and ethnic cleansing

are now built, one carrying the edifice

of ethnic cleansing and segregation

since Nakba, the justification for everything

that can't be justified, the other one

a Year Zero for the Zionists,

the Khmer Rouge of Palestine,

and the Killing Fields of Gaza

we are told are justified by a single day,

and seventy-seven years by that day

and an another genocide.

09.06.2025

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ALL THE WARMTH IN THE LANDSCAPE

Seventeen degrees and it feels cold

after the Sun vanished behind the clouds,

all the warmth in the landscape

and the air a tide that receded with the light.

07.-09.06.2025

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A VESSEL

I'm curiosity and knowledge,

I'm desire, mirth and grief,

I'm anger and sadness,

I'm love, lust and jealousy,

fed from many sources;

a vessel, a cistern empty

nay for streams from springs

distant in time and space,

but not in thought, to fill.

07.-09.06.2025

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FOOTAGE OF "JUNE 9TH"

After capturing Madleen

and its aid for the victims of the ongoing genocide,

baby formula being danger to the state of Israel

as it murders babies each day,

the Apartheid State declares -

and its 'Western' stenographers in the press

repeat to their hostage audiences -

that the activists will be shown

"footage of October 7th",

this being to the likes of The Guardian

the most important news about occupied Palestine

today, not the fact that Madleen

was captured, not that Israel again shot

and killed people seeking aid

from the US mercenaries, killing two

and wounding twelve, which gets

a sentence, while rest of the slaughter

goes unmentioned. No footage

from "June 9th" from Gaza, footage

that is just a click away

for the stenographer playing journalist -

the hungry, the wounded, the dead,

the families sheltering in ruins,

in tent camps targeted by genocidal Israel

today as in yesterday. It's all there,

captured by real journalists

in Gaza, dying to bring it. But no, 

no footage from "June 9th", no photographs

from "June 9th" in Gaza. The work

of the 'Western' journalist is to hide

and manage the news

for the genocidal Apartheid regime

so that it can take baby formula from babies

and then kill them with their mothers.

09.06.2025

THE WORDS CONNECTED TO ISRAEL

The words connected to Israel

are not "Holocaust" and "Judaism" 

- those belong to Jews,

not the Israeli regime -

but "Apartheid", "Ethnic Cleansing,"

"Genocide", "Rape" and "Torture",

and no amount of chanting "October 7th"

will erase the Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing,

Rape and Torture after,

or the Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing

and Torture before.

09.06.2025

LOUDLY NOW

Remembering

how she told

how they might

do private things,

shared things,

at the same time,

together, months

ago, he

             hopes

she hears his

late,

        fervent 'Yes'.

09.06.2025

THE LIGHT WANES

The light wanes,

the clouds come and escort

the Sun away to rest

on their soft pillows,

and the air chills

while the Sun lies

on white bosoms.

09.06.2025

THE HEART OF HIS LONGING

Picking up his favourite

photograph

of her

he gazes at her

opening flesh,

beholding

what he desires

until he feels

her flesh at his touch,

runs his fingers slowly

across her skin

towards

the heart

of his longing.

09.06.2025

THE PIRATES CAPTURED MADLEEN

The pirates captured Madleen

on international waters

after a day during which

they bombed two United Nations schools

housing refugees,

killed a family of six

in an another attack,

shot a deaf young man in head,

fatally, murdered

some four dozen people

total, at least.

A 'normal' day for the Apartheid State

which believes that as long

the Macrons and the Starmers

grovel before them,

and the Bidens and the Trumps

fund, arm and cover them,

nothing else matters.

They are wrong.

09.06.2025

NOTICING HOW DARK IT HAS COME AND REALIZING IT'S PAST MIDNIGHT

I listen to midnight's faint hum

from the open window,

think about making more coffee,

getting away from the computer,

finally doing something more

than poetry and shouting

about one genocide

and whispering about another.

Haven't I done enough?

No, I haven't.

How could I?

Like my old people said,

"There's enough time to rest

in the grave."

09.06.2025

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