for trayvon martin
in the light of truth
a killer is a killer
a killer is a killer
no jury can release
him from the truth
law and courts
can be bend
but truth is what it is
and killer is a killer
14.07.2013
sunnuntai 14. heinäkuuta 2013
torstai 27. kesäkuuta 2013
Us, the Universe
We are not independent observers,
inside the universe
but separate from it.
No, we are the universe,
for a moment taking the form
of a sentient being.
When we look around us,
from the grass on the ground
to the stars above
we are looking at ourselves.
When we try to understand
the universe
we are trying
we are trying
to understand ourselves.
27.06.2013
These are not my own, independent thoughts. Many people have written such things before and although I share this view I express in the poem, I am following a well traveled path.
tiistai 25. kesäkuuta 2013
maanantai 24. kesäkuuta 2013
sunnuntai 23. kesäkuuta 2013
lauantai 22. kesäkuuta 2013
Past has become
a land of sorrow,
where memories with thorns
make mind bleed.
Come, say the
memories, touch us
and remember,
touch us and feel the pain.
Images of former happiness
come drifting,
half-sunken hulks
with barnacles of
loss growing on them.
There is no going back,
no rescue, no forgetfulness.
No river Lethe to bring
the bliss of forgetting,
letting the past
sail away on its water.
11.06.-22.06.2013
Labyrinth of Life
From the darkness emerges
the bull-head of Minotauros
and you, sword-wielder,
are not the shared son of god
and an Athenian king,
you are not destined to sail
with black sails back to home.
No, whoever was on your side
was not a princess with a ball
of thread, but fear-ruled ran away
leaving you to raise your sword
and shield in a futile gesture
no one shall learn of
when they find your
gnawed bones,
hearing the man-bull
roaring in the darkness.
22.06.2013
keskiviikko 19. kesäkuuta 2013
tiistai 18. kesäkuuta 2013
maanantai 17. kesäkuuta 2013
The Evil of Cancer
I read about "the evil of cancer" just now, again,
from a newspaper,
and thought about
my mother, her sister, my paternal grandparents
who all died of cancer.
58, 56, 53, 57.
My paternal grandparents were
in their graves before I was born,
my grandfather a forgotten Don Juan figure
who spread misery and broke marriages,
mostly his own ones;
my grandmother's grave a place of pilgrimage,
dutifully done so that
her ever fewer surviving acquaintances
her ever fewer surviving acquaintances
on their visits to the graveyard
in our old home county
"would see that somebody has been here"
as my father said,
again and again through the decades.
My mother, her sister: Pain and guilt in my mind,
my aunt tied to her eldest son,
my late cousin, 27,
in my thoughts,
rage and grief and more rage in my mind
as I think about them,
and my my mother, my mother
a cause of endless sorrow,
guilt like an open wound
that never can nor should close,
my life one long betrayal of her
during these last 18 years,
all her dreams and hopes unfulfilled,
and I cowardly enough not to be on her side
when it would have mattered.
But the cancers that took them all
were not evil, they just were.
A disease has no mind, no morality,
it doesn't set out to destroy
and end lives like a humans do.
We see it as a kind of human
when we claim that it is evil,
we see it as an adversary
that tries to harm our loved ones
and we are wrong.
We extend humanity out to the world,
give a little piece of Homo Sapies to all things
we see around us,
moral colouring to events
that have none.
A cancer like a tsunami
has no meaning in itself, no goal,
they are just natural results
of events, biological and geological.
It's their results that are tragic,
cutting through lives.
No evil is involved when a submarine
earthquake creates a tsunami,
just geology and chance,
and when cancer attacks a human body
it is the same. It just happens,
beyond the boundaries of the moral universe
we humans have created
and believe in.
The results of cancer are evil to us,
but in itself cancer is just biology,
it just is, separate
from our moral universe,
like the dark matter and dark energy
that guide the physical universe
more than what can be seen.
Like the observable cosmos
which can not influence the dark energy
that is accelerating it's expansion
and taking it towards a premature end -
which to us is also an evil in it's consequences -
a cancer that ravages
our loved ones from the inside
is an evil to us,
but to the universe around us,
to the biological mass living on the surface of Earth
and burrowing under it's surface,
flying high in it's atmosphere,
it just is.
Only us, humans,
can be evil.
17.06.2013
perjantai 14. kesäkuuta 2013
Creatrix
I'm thinking of you again today,
I'm thinking of you again today,
imagining you see the same rain,
hear the same hammering on the roof
as I do, look outside and see
the landscape in all the shades of green
like I do, that you breath like I do,
make coffee, read some cheap
romance novel or one of the historical
novels that I bought you, never
finishing the series about Egypt
which I regret everytime I remember
them; you wanted hardcovers and
I bought one paperback after the
hardbacks and never more, and
it was a betrayal, one of those
little betrayals that grew into the
great betrayal, and ever since you
died I have understood well what
I always found odd, Robert E.
Howard's suicide. I read yesterday
about re-prints of Valérian and Laureline comics,
remembered how you liked them,
how I liked them and now can't think of
how I liked them and now can't think of
them separately from you. You gave me
the love of reading, love of speculative
and all I gave you was disappointments
and not enough of my time. I thought
there would be, but then there was none
and even then I did not understand
to spend every minute I could
beside your bed. It was a debt I owed,
like the fulfillment of your dreams
about what I would become that I owed
and I betrayed you, betrayed you so
many times, you who carried me
nine months in you womb and
thirty-two years, four months, one day
and seven hours afterwards.
14.06.2013
torstai 13. kesäkuuta 2013
‘Evening Snow at Edo River'(1932) by Hasui Kawase(1883-1957)
Two women in kimonos,
holding umbrellas,
are crossing a wooden bridge
as snow falls.
The sky is dark blue.
We don't see any clouds.
We don't see any clouds.
Under the bridge
the water is also dark blue.
In distant Manchuria,
Japanese armies were
putting Puyi on
the throne Manchukuo,
the Empire was marching
to it's defeat through
yet another victory.
13.06.2013
A Memory
People making their way on a
wooden bridge over a river,
a boat passing below
with a solitary figure
standing on it's stern.
Words written beside them
in a blank ink,
flowing.
Was it Bashõ's poem
on the opposite page?
It must have been -
what else would I
have been reading then?
The picture a wood print of Edo,
a hundred years
after his time, perhaps,
the calligraphy
nothing to do with him,
closed from me
who only saw
Bashõ's poem in it.
13.06.201
keskiviikko 12. kesäkuuta 2013
maanantai 10. kesäkuuta 2013
In memory of Iain Banks(1954-2013)
No paradise waiting, no resurrection, no rebirth
from old rattling bones life arising
or from new womb old sould finding refuge.
No, just the end, darkness and
Void like none between the stars.
There's no mercy that we don't create ourselves,
there's no life but this in blood and flesh and bone
spending fleeting decades in wonder
looking around and up on this speck of dust
wandering in the Cosmic night,
asking questions, telling stories,
keeping the Void at bay until we can no more.
10.06.2013
sunnuntai 9. kesäkuuta 2013
Leader of the Free World
How many times you Yankees shouted that
during the Cold War, giddily
worshipping your presidents
and what they supposedly embodied,
and now, my dear Americans,
with PRISM, with Boundless Informant,
your super-Stasi NSA,
it's clear that those who
had been following your leaders,
who were forced to do so
by our weakling governments,
were led to a cage
with glass walls
and the million employees of your sixteen secret services
are standing behind those walls,
repeating to you, their "fellow Americans"
that they are doing this
only to "foreigners", us.
Perhaps it hides the glass walls of your own cages.
09.06.2013
perjantai 7. kesäkuuta 2013
Langdon Warner(1881-1955) in Dunhuang
Arriving late,
he had no manuscripts to buy for a pittance
from an old Daoist,
so he hacked off what murals he could,
took a couple of statues as an extra
and announced
the imminent destruction of the rest
to sooth his conscience
and shield his reputation.
United States had come late
to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,
but had still it's share
of empty holes in frescoes
to remind people of it's visit.
07.06.2013
maanantai 3. kesäkuuta 2013
sunnuntai 2. kesäkuuta 2013
I was a question you never could solve,
the one which defied all logic
and you never risked all
on a leap of faith,
always being the careful one,
aware of how badly these kind of stories
tend to end in the real life.
So you went away,
cutting your losses,
and I let you go
without pleading,
always the one who
to the last moment believes
that the other one will turn around,
and will come back
without a need for an emotional scene.
02.06.2013
perjantai 31. toukokuuta 2013
Past midnight, the birds have fallen silent
but the cars keep roaring through the night
singing about civilization and the
straight lines it draws through the land.
It goes on, that song of asphalt, as
the metal frames whisk flesh, bone and
blood from one place to another without
relieving them of the emptiness
and longing they carry in their minds.
A bird is happy where it is, perching on
a branch in the dark, a human being is restless
in her or his metal cage, going through the
radio stations in search of nostalgia and hope,
on that straight line drawn from one place
to another, from birth to death.
31.05.2013
torstai 23. toukokuuta 2013
A Good Life
To live a good life is to forget death,
the end that comes to all that lives and all that is dear;
that all will be lost that can be lost
and that nothing once lost can ever be regained.
That tears are the truth and smiles are the deceit.
Life is a story of loss and in the end always a tragedy,
but to be happy we have to be innocent enough,
deluded enough to mistake it for a romance
deluded enough to mistake it for a romance
or a heroic epic where the main character is left standing,
waving to the audience when the curtain falls.
sunnuntai 19. toukokuuta 2013
torstai 16. toukokuuta 2013
sunnuntai 12. toukokuuta 2013
Marathon of Life
The days with their quick feet
The days with their quick feet
running past us,
running past us
to some finishing line
we can't fathom,
we who shall quit the race
and will spent a last laboured moment
beside the road
watching the days with their
quick, quick feet
running from the past to the future
that no longer belongs to us.
12.05.2013
perjantai 10. toukokuuta 2013
torstai 9. toukokuuta 2013
Memories
Our past is a graveyard of the restless dead
living in our memories,
existing in moments carved into our consciousness;
the loved and lost demanding our attention,
our sorrow, our tears, our repentance
until death or blissful dementia brings release
from the weight of our life,
leaving ourselves phantoms in amber
in the minds of others.
09.05.2013
sunnuntai 5. toukokuuta 2013
Matercula
I'm talking to you,
I'm talking to you,
offering you the withered memories of better days,
the sharp memories of the last months
and the pain of current existence
as my gifts, my apology;
the rain of this dark evening,
the disappointments of this
descending life,
the squirrel running up the fir tree,
the blond cat sitting in the broken window
of the red garage,
the muddy paw prints of the dog
on the newspapers spread on the floor
of the entryway -
I offer all of these.
The gray clouds above are yours,
the water rushing in the stream are yours,
the dirty snow lingering here and there,
it's all yours,
all what my eyes can see,
all that my consciousness can admit,
it's all yours, it's all yours,
like the flickering flame
in your gravestone lamp.
05.05.2013
perjantai 3. toukokuuta 2013
This May afternoon the Spring,
the late coming,
the late coming,
long-awaited Spring
is already old in the Sun's tired light,
in the whirling dust rising from the gravel
in the whirling dust rising from the gravel
roads and fallow fields;
old even when no flowers yet
old even when no flowers yet
can be covered in that dust
that dances slowly, slowly
that dances slowly, slowly
in the golden-hued light.
In the voice of yesteryear the day,
the landscape tell
the landscape tell
of things ending,
not of rebirth.
Things pass away
not of rebirth.
Things pass away
and only dust remains,
inanimate matter toyed
with by wind and light.
03.05.2013
keskiviikko 1. toukokuuta 2013
May Morning, After Sleepless Night
Morning, sun bathing the treetops
with warm golden light. Thoughts
wander still on their nightly paths,
tired, frustrated even under the
bright blue sky. Frost on the
fields, gravel scrunching under
feet, birds singing. Only sleep can
bury the guilt-ridden memories
the night awoke, not this cold
morning of May, not this
light that falls upon the dead
grass of yesteryear. Better
the dusty air of silent rooms,
their shadows, better a long
sleep than this cold brightness
of an icy spring day that
should tell of life starting anew
but just resounds in lives
that ended.
01.05.2013
Nocturne
Among the whispering trees,
Among the whispering trees,
the tall shadows piercing the night,
the memories of past awaken
and it feels that if you could
just take the correct step
you would step outside this
moment burdened by sadness
and the night would be
another night, decades in the past,
mistakes could be corrected
when you would make
your way to the lights
in the distance and
the people waiting you there,
the tall shadows of your past
that still whisper in your memories.
01.05.2013
Twenty years after
I remember the long, rainy nights
spend on listening to Jazz, Blues and Ambient
when the whole world up to the darkness
itself seemed to be alive -
all essence, all life
and myriad paths ran through it
to possible futures
all equally enchanting.
I would go outside to
feel the rain, to hear
it's sounds, the whisper
of the trees, the wind -
to catch the first hint of
a change of seasons, perhaps,
although it did not matter,
as all was one and I was
one with everything,
not disturbing, not
out of place, but just
like the rain passing through it
in my way to something greater.
01.05.2013
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