On the Nature of Art

Do you need an artist to make art?

(flash of genius?)

We can claim:

Making art makes an artist

as much an artist makes art,

through one the other is born

to give birth to it.

Art is deliberate creation.

(in the marble the statue
was already present to the sculptor)

BUT

Art is not a deliberate creation by an individual

aware of their role as an artist. 

(craftsman elevated by posterity!)

Someone else,

someone with authority,

needs to confirm the creation as art:

Art critic, art historian, "other" artists.

Someone who has been given this authority

by a society or a slice of it.

Only the stamp of authority creates

art out of an object,

an artist out of a person.

(social contract of art)

Art and artist are both communal creations.

An individual in isolation

can never be an artist,

their creations can never be art. 

(ouroboros?)

In the end

stand the one or those who first

came up with the idea of art,

the maker or makers

of all artists.

14.05.2015

call for revolution

if word is a poetic object

then it must be a stone

a molotov cocktail

thrown at the world's injustices

and a poem

must be an uprising

a barricade

across literature and society

14.05.2015

a molotov cocktail of words

if a poet

doesn't want to change the world

why is (s)he writing

in the first place?

art pour l'art

is no better excuse

than

'i was just following orders'

if you want to re-arrange

without disturbing existence

go and re-arrange flowers

or a sand garden

a poem should be a grenade

a molotov cocktail

flying through the society

setting it on fire on impact

14.05.2015

rohingya refugees: a crime against humanity

adrift at sea

abandoned

by smugglers

Malaysian navy

and humanity

alike

ten dead in one vessel

thousands in boats

escaping genocide

and not again never again

the empty slogan

we knew it to be

14.05.2015

poetry after auschwitz

dear adorno

of the sad gaze

declaring the sentence

for an age

your time

1903-1969

was not special

in evil

except to you

for you lived it

if there could not be

put barbaric poetry

after the gas chambers

after the ash

there could have

never been but barbaric poetry

in the first place

for human history

is a tale

written in blood

by each generation

in it's turn

& the suffering of

each individual

is of equal importance

whether they died

in the centre of europe

or not

& all are

equally forgotten

as the great wheel

of time grinds

memories

into dust

14.05.2015

connexion

poetry is a message

from the writer of the poem

(some of whom might be called poets)

to the readers of the poem

the people

(often called the audience, wrongly)

who take the dead words

and give them life

each according to

their inner self

14.05.2015

norway

to my mother 

the grey sea

under the grey sky

hitting the grey rocks

sculpting them

like the cold wind

sculpts the

people

you loved it

the shore

that faces the pole

the land

where land

ends

14.05.2015

of the death of poetry: a suicide

a poet who doesn't

(at least occasionally)

write for the people

of their time

and their lives,

their troubles

and their hopes

should not ask

why poetry

is dying

14.05.2015

To United States' Senate

Israel's illegal colonies are more American

 

than apple pie, Super Bowl, homeless veterans, collapsing infrastructure

and black youths shot with a dozen warning shots in the back by white policemen.

They are American virtues

given architectural form.

Colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Jim Crow, racism, segregation,

theocracy, Zionism.

11.05.2015

Night Jazz: Stanley Turrentine(1934-2000) After Birdsongs

Listening to the birds sing outside first

in the cool spring air

shouting after the dog

exploring scents

(it was the fox or the cat or perhaps a lynx)

now with a mug of old coffee beside me

clock ticking towards five a.m.

it's Stanley Turrentine's time

to fill my mind with colours

feelings racing around

like there would be a reason

to be cheerful and hopeful

in this world

where you rise up after falling

only to notice

you broke your knee

hobble forward

until you have to crawl

and die beside the road

that's the human fate

but birds don't know

and nightly jazz

now makes me feel

I don't care

when I do

all of us seven billion cripples

hobbling on after some receding dream

fata morgana

until that grave beside the road

is for dug for each of us too

09.05.2015

 

The Spanish Boy: A Life of Albert Camus

There was a little fatherless Spanish boy

in Algeria under the French rule

whose French father had died for France

and in French soil decomposed,

son raised by illiterate Spaniards

in colonial poverty.

There was nothing more he wanted

than stop being an outsider, to be

a Frenchman among the French in France.

To become was to deny, to exclude,

to embrace the Blackfoots as his people,

to make Algeria into France, into Europe.

Those who did not fit, those could not

fit in an European France in Algeria

he muted, marginalized,

to push himself among the French

to become French in France

the price was to silence, to deny -

with word to conquer the land again,

with sentences to make it anew,

with paragraphs to make the native

the alien in their land, in his land;

the land he pushed away without noticing

in his new identity he embraced

to the end; like his father in his coloured

colonial uniform before him,

he in the uniform of a thinker for France

he too, died in Europe,

away from the land that bursted off the mould

and pushed away the Blackfoots

who knew no compromise,

for they, like the Italian boy,

could only accept being Frenchmen in France.

And there he decomposed,

there his grave lies,

a Frenchman in France in his French grave.

09.05.2015

For England Made Anew

Let fires make ground for new politics

where votes confirmed existing evil,

let Molotov's cocktails
flying through the air

bring forth a future build of

privilege made ash;

let broken windows tell of disaffection

where pensioners voted in droves

to hurt the young knowing

their pensions were safe -

the world for them in a pension,

nothing else of consequence

beyond the Queen Maggot

and her white corpse worms of offspring.

Ruins and fires, police helmets

rolling in the ground empty, smeared in blood,

pools of blood to paint the land anew

and to make the prime minister

eat off the streets the crap of scared police horses

which ran away riderless,

the power vested in violence unhorsed.

Let there be anger, let there be

violence erupting from anger

and let there be hate,

fire from hate to devour,

to leap from one elite residence

to the another;

let stones through windows make homes

of palaces

for the homeless,

let a nation tremble

in the terrible birth for hope.

09.05.2015

After the victory of evil in the United Kingdom

Do not praise politicians for making

"hard decisions", "tough choices"

if nothing ill could come to themselves

as a result of them,

beyond losing power in the next election.

Hard decision is a decision that hits

the one who makes it too, deeply;

tough choice is a choice that

means giving up something

more than votes.

These should result in sleepless nights,

in conscience never giving rest -

at the minimum. At the minimum.

A Rwandan mother had a hard decision:

Which of two chilren bury alive

to save the other. "Mother, this

is not funny anymore",

the child's last words

as genocidaires stood around the

grave with their guns.

That was a hard decision,

that was a thought choice,

that was inhuman,

no politician has to go through that

when they cut benefits

from the disabled,

when they go and privatize

public healthcare.

09.05.2015

 An organism

Read Herman Hesse and Santoka in the lavatory,

diarrhea again,

took urine samples to laboratory this morning,

all those things remains of what go through us

like those words I read -

what will the words leave behind?

What of them will become me,

what will drive me forward

and what end up flushed down the toilet?

So much can be told about us

by medical staff and archaeologists alike

based on our faeces,

but that what remained with us

no coprolite, no urine sample

will reveal. It became us,

we became it,

what we became perished,

except those words we left behind,

the facade of our wisdom.

07.05.2015

For A Better World

As long as there is violence,

let it be revolutionary violence.

As long as veins bleed dry,

let them bleed for humanity.

As long as there is injustice,

let there be fighters for justice.

07.05.2015

Clear, light blue morning air

at five twentyseven

on the sixth of May

and a bird starts singing,

then another,

in the trees that remain

after man and storm

came and went

in their fury.

06.05.2015

At least no blood, like with Francis Drake

Flushed the toilet,

once again diarrhea

my nightly companion.

Sitting there, I read

Santoka. Dead for

seventyfive-years, yet

walking in

the rain, still, the

poor drunk poet

on some mountain

path that leads

only to loneliness.

06.05.2015

Neoliberals

If you want people to reach for the stars,

don't force them to live in gutter.

They won't be dreaming of the stars there,

much, but of drowning you in the sewage.

06.05.2015

The Official Martyr That Justifies the Killing of Unofficial Ones

A young man looks from the photos,

serious in uniform, smiling without one.

Different sources give different birth year:

1989 or 1990. In 2015 he died.

He was shot in the head, died after few days.

May he rest in peace.

But they promote him with a message

between the lines:

This young cop was killed

so it was all-right to kill all those

thousands of brown, black,

homeless and insane

we kill each decade

in name of the law.

Yours, the police forces

of the United States of America.

05.05.2015

Revolutionary Army of Japan

What fine news to end a sleepless night with

as birds sing in the brightening May air outside:

A mortar attack on USA army base in Japan

by a leftwing Revolutionary Army!

Good to lie down on the sofa, warm

with that exuberant feeling that comes of

revolutionary violence against imperialism,

even when it was just two home-made grenades

and I have a breathing mask on my face,

too feeble to do more than write myself.

05.05.2015

Archaeopteryx on my backyard
 

There's something extraordinary

in the first flight of a young bird,

that first step into the unknown,

into air, the conquest of that dimension

like it's ancestors so long ago

in their dinosaur guise

reaching for prey, safety

and this day, this little bird

beating it's wings awkwardly. 

04.05.2015

Garland

I have a right to insult you,

but you don't have a right

to be insulted

or to react,

got it?

But if you insult

my country

or my religion...

04.05.2015

Encounter on a lonely road

Abandoning starving toddler

on the side of the road,

onward rode the samurai

in the monk's apparel.

Even to carry the child

into human habitation

was a deed beyond him.

Distant shrines were calling.

 

Better than throwing a piece of bread

would have been to still to carry a sword

and end the cries of the starving child

left in the wilderness, Bashõ.

03.05.2015

Comment to a man who locked his first wife in an asylum for decades

Time isn't conquered,

time conquers

and in the end,

the long end without an end,

time conquers all matter

and becomes the universe

and the birth of new universes.

Time, you could say, is a god,

and the long end

becomes uncountable beginnings.

03.05.2015

Freddie Gray Is Dead

Mainstream media cries

that there is a riot going on,

that a store was burned,

a mall is being looted.

A man's spine

was almost severed,

his voice box crushed.

He died.

They knew what was coming,

after Ferguson and the protests

last year they knew.

The civic leaders of Baltimore knew.

But they chose to protect the police,

like they did in Ferguson

and New York

and everywhere.

They chose fire, they chose looting,

they chose rioting -

the leaders of Baltimore

and those above them in the ladder chose this.

When they severed his spine,

when they crushed his voice box,

when they threw him in the van

the police chose this too.

28.04.2015

Rain, birds still sing

under the gray clouds

make their nests

in the chill wind.

26.04.2015

Voyagers into the Interstellar Space

Rising from the gravity well of our Sun,

reaching out

into the empty void,

my peers, launched on their travel

the year I was born,

drifting between the stars

billions of years after

I and the Earth both are gone,

our atoms engulfed by the Sun

whose reach we never escaped.

23.04.2015

Earth Day

Sun shining long in to the April evening

For thirty-two years I never saw it there

high on the spring sky

through the tall thick forest of firs and pines

now felled

hundred years of growth

22.04.2015

Do not ask for forgiveness

broken minds and hearts

dead lips can't give any

Just change

become someone

who doesn't have to ask for forgiveness

22.04.2015

evening scene in early spring

crescent moon

above bloody shreds of clouds

the lights of cars

mapping the road

at the bottom

ants creeping up the hill

beyond the stumps of felled trees

21.04.2015

EDLA KANGASNIEMI(1879-1926)

of course it was the mother who died first

the mother who had buried first two of her boys

the mother of the son who ran away for a life in circus at 15

the mother of the son who was left behind by the father after mother was no more

that son who begetted four children but could not be a father even to one

that son grandfather of mine who lived

under the shadow of his mother

under the shadow of her death

under the shadow of the family

that suddenly was no more

when he was 12

19.04.2015

After winter, before spring in a changed climate

The new, fifth season -

the second autumn, the pre-spring

a wasteland between winter and spring

to cross under cloudy skies

in the old autumn's waste,

but birds... the birds already sing

and on the roadsides tiny coltsfoot flowers,

little suns.

19.04.2015

We are always living the past

There is no present,

only the past,

ever-fleeting,

ever-disappearing,

ever-changing.

We are always

just missing it,

the present,

those seconds

already falling away

in time.

All we have

is a memory,

the shortening future

turning into the past

without a present,

like water vapour

to frost on Mars.

18.04.2015

Of Saigyõ(1118-1190)

Watching from the sidelines,

on those roads beyond the gates

composing conversation

with life, religion, nature

as power shifted hands

and sea took child emperor and court...

So far away from his time

as one of the old emperor's

youthful playthings in armour

that he had to come up with

a world of his own,

world of words and memory

made into words,

religion the unchanging change

behind a crumbling order

and clashing swords,

blood on the fields.

18.04.2015

on an april day

muddy yard

pool of water

reflecting clouds

bare branches

the deep silence

of the saturday afternoon

18.04.2015

birds are already singing

of spring

among the falling snow

of april

18.04.2015

with unchained anger

my paternal grandmother died on april fool's day

after a life time of sorrow disappointment and hard work aged 53

the last cruel joke from god or cosmos or fate

that could not care less

like my mother aged 58

to the last

she dreamed

of something better

moving out

last travel

to somewhere

where it would be better

for them

i hate those

who see order and plan

in the universe

a hand of god karma

who think justice will be done

that in the end all will be right

that we must take live as it comes

accept all

no we must be filled with rage

rage and hate

for the fate of human in this universe on this planet this society this land

against those who think demand preach write we should accept it all

hate and rage

will uplift us

save as as much

as we can as individuals nation society civilization species

hate and rage

trust them

embrace them

show them

with unchained anger

14.04.2015

i not I

the lower-case letter

minuscule

just perfect

for me

14.04.2015

To the raging wind
which tears down towering trees
i give my sorrows to carry

14.04.2015

Of time, again

There might not be time

as the scholars say

but there is a sense of time

and a sense of loss

that perfect moment

you can return to

only in memory

until it too grows dim

06.04.2015

Beside the fallow field

A stone upon a boulder

resting

like it has

ten-thousand years

& I

sitting beside it

this early spring

afternoon

06.04.2015

From the branches of Yggdrasil,

knowledge Odin sought,

night and days hanging,

the fruit of wisdom

no snake had to tell innocents to pick;

he picked it himself,

the father of gods,

rising from the dead.

But no hidden knowledge revealed

would save him

from the wolf-son of the Trickster;

truth his first death gave to him.

01.04.2015