scattered like

this spring's pollen

the years

the memories

making up our past

making up us

31.05.2017

green grass

under your feet

last summer

green grass

on this summer

on your grave

my father

31.05.2017

like a sudden breeze

coming going

a human life

31.05.2017

 THE SPEECH OF MARIANUS AT THERMOPYLAE, AFTER DEXIPPUS

At Thermopylae, in the shadow

Of those who found death facing the might of Xerxes,

Seven centuries have passed and the

Goths are approaching. A speech

Raising spectres for living men's strength,

Preparations for a battle

Whose course eludes as;

Their fate unknown, fame unfound,

These defenders of Thermopylae

Even fainter spectres, barely seen.

17.07.2017

Is this a faint echo

Of the pain you felt

The pain of which

There was no escape

The pain that became

Everything

Mother Father

Is this what I feel

A faint echo

Of your deaths?

08.05.2017

If this night the

Void would open 

Before me

I would step forward

Embracing it

Like one welcomes

Long-lost loved

04.05.-06.05.2017

THOSE WHO BLAME NAZIM HIKMET

They blame Hikmet, accuse him of being a 'Stalinist'

But they never blame those

Who were silent, without raising a voice

Or moving a pen

When Hikmet was in prison those long years.

From his Turkish prison cell, they claim,

Hikmet should have raged against the Soviet purges,

The gulags and the show trials;

The Left, they demand, must

Not have any of the faults

They accept with an indifferent shrug

In the Centre and the Right.

Outside the brick and stone walls,

The iron and steel in doors and windows

They demand, they who have never

Defecated and pissed in rusty buckets,

They demand and pass judgment -

Silent on those who now count the years

From freedom.

04.05.2017

I feel ill, a union

of physical and mental

failure, a state

of being on my knees,

as the world, life

turn and capsize.

My father, he died

on this floor I lay on,

remade by him, I

have forgotten the colour

it had, on that day

I first stepped in.

I only recall, remember,

the light of that day.

The light of all, of all

the coming days and years,

until now, on floorboards

he set, I seek the feeling

of his hands that placed them,

those hard, work-scarred

hands that still in that photo

wash me, few months old.

I don't think he was ever as happy

with me afterwards, as he was then.

14.04.2017

The Day Before Your Funeral

Cold, gray mid-day, the day

before your funeral. Nothing

moves outside. I'm shivering,

drinking bad coffee, black,

ran out of milk. In this

room where you spent

so much time, you died. Soon

three weeks, and tomorrow

I will be carrying

you to your grave, far

from where you were born,

at a sauna among the

ruins of a burned town. So

many years, so short

a life, you both

now, my father

and my mother, away

in the cold ground,

and your faith in

me, what I have to

show for it? All

those sacrifices, all

what you did and

what you gave up -

nothing, nothing.

Just years like

last summer's dead weeds

breaking through

the snow of the past.

16.02.2017

Andre, Henry, Roger and the other Roger and so on...

One can whine about 'socialist realism',

but look at all the pedophiles

producing the 'bourgeois literature' 

of the time; a cabinet of monsters.

Genius justifies everything,

goal of social progress and equality nothing

- so say the

guardians of literary immortality still.

And when a genius betrays everything

he claims he stood for, what he claimed

society and civilization stands for,

when he betrays basic human decency...

Then he's still a genius, a worthy one,

his work adored, his crimes pushed aside,

justified - he didn't really hurt anyone,

did he, when he fucked a ten-year-old?

Because he was bourgeois,

he made art for the sake of art,

he made art for the bourgeois

and for the bourgeois who despise the bourgeois.

He was one of them, one of them

who have the keys to the kingdom of literature,

who anoint with holy oil the chosen

and put laurels on their embalmed heads.

27.03.2017

Against the defense of a sexual predator Andre Gide by Edmund White

But as Alan Sheridan writes of Gide in his comprehensive (et compréhensif!) book, ‘surprisingly, no complaint was ever made against him, either by a boy or by his parents. He was, of course, protected by the innocence of the times. But he never forced his attentions on anyone.’

Edmund White: On the chance that a shepherd boy …

London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 24, 10th December 1998.

Except poor boys, barely in their teens,

living under colonial military occupation,

who had to prostitute themselves to survive

and help their families to survive.

Poor boys who sucked his dick to get bread

and who let him put his dick in their asshole

and fuck them

so that they could get almonds and dates

to bring back to their siblings to eat.

But they don't count, do they, Edmund White?

And the 'innocence of the times' -

perhaps 'someone' just got through

part of his 'private education'

by sleeping with his history teachers?

A Memory From the Eighties

I remember awakening among the clouds

on the top of a Norwegian fell,

moss and lichen and rocks

all else erased by the clouds

and behind me a tent, in

sleeping bags my family,

my whole world that circle

of thirty meters of silence I could see.

Below, the fjords, the blue sea,

somewhere behind the NATO base

we had driven past - No Stopping -

and the nuclear war fears

the time harboured, the fear

of sirens, of a message in the radio,

the cloud. The end, silent.

What hour was it? I didn't

know. Deep northern summer,

the endless light, seeping

through the clouds; timeless

moment, timeless

existence, and

behind, in the tent

my whole world.

25.03.2017 

Its not news in this time of ours

that someone eats human brain in a TV program,

what is newsworthy is

that some people still get offended by it.

And what is even more surprising

is that some care

about them being offended.

So quaintly charming.

11.03.2017

Eulogy for a Giant African Snail

There are supposed big deaths

of Very Important People

that don't really matter.

Very Important People,

allegedly, who seem oddly

inconsequential to the world,

existence, us and the human civilization.

There are small deaths

of small beings

that matter. 

That touch us.

Hurt us.

Make us stand back, changed.

This death of a giant African snail

was such a death.

It had an impact, it affects me.

Indirectly I was responsible.

I could have avoided it.

If I would have known,

I could have stopped

its needless suffering.

A bland man who played in some mediocre movies

which made a lot of money

(without it being down to him)

and in some bad movies

which made little money

(without either being his fault)

died also.

For him I couldn't have done anything.

To him I owed nothing.

His death raised no emotions in me.

I remember making facial expressions

didn't come to him easily or convincingly.

Perhaps it was botox.

Perhaps it was bad acting.

Perhaps, just like with the

Giant African Snail,

emotions just weren't his thing.

He was a good man,

another Very Important Person says.

Who am I to argue with that?

I would have still chosen

to save the Giant African Snail

instead of Bill Paxton.

27.02.2017

Electric light passes for life

in this darkness,

rising, fading, rising

like a beating heart,

a chest rising and falling

with each breath taken, desperate

gulps of air in to the lungs,

grasping to each minute

as it falls away to

become the past,

life becoming memories

and death,

death all around,

the darkness waiting

knowing in the end

it will become all there is.

16.09.2016-27.02.2017

All the prints left on the snow,

no matter the size of the feet

or the paws that left them,

are white. The mark

on the material becomes it,

a memory made visible.

15.01.-27.02.2017

Answer To My Friend Simon

We are echoes in eternity, fading.

27.02.2017

To My Father

The house is cold and empty

Your bed stands stripped

Your mattress among the firewood

The linen thrown away

Just silence

Inside the walls

Where I kissed your cold brow

Where I failed you

Where I failed you so many times

Where I failed you one final time

Twice you spoke of the pain

Twice you spoke

And I didn't save us

07.02.2017

Sojourn In Egypt

1

Omar Pound

never knew

his father.

2

From Isis

Dorothy got

what Ezra

couldn't give

her: a son.

3

Sand now

only

knows the

well beside

which the

bloody clothes

were left.

4

At the bottom,

a living Joseph

or a dead Caliph

al-Hakim?

5

Dust

and secrets

turned to dust.

6

Ezra signed

the birth certificate

but Ernest

was with her

at the hospital.

7

The soap bubble lives

of the artistes

turned to art

and reflection

from gossip -

a Midas' touch

turning everything

into words.

24.01.2017

the thoughts slippery at night

sentences falling away depths unseen

coherence lost left the 'I' wondering

grasping losing nothing but itself

generating throwing vanishing thoughts

small stones thrown at black water at night

gone thrown gone sent gone lost gone

gone gone gone gone gone going

peeling layers of thoughts the onion of mind

never hitting that gray piece that is I

wanting to feel itself holding itself

pressing pressing crushing

20.01.2017

We all are the sum

of our mistakes

more than our successes;

the harm done

always goes deeper

than the good achieved.

Yet that good

is all we have

to pay for the harm,

and increasing it

the justification

for our
continued existence.

15.01.2017

An Answer For My Niece

For Jii

Why do yo write so much? she asks,

the young voice exasperated.

I seek an answer, stumble,

then grab what I can

and mould it into an answer:

I want to preserve moments.

Now, looking back,

I have more to say.

The words I couldn't find for you then:

To write is to record;

a text is a memory

of at least of the process of writing

and to read is to experience

the past, to unite

the past and this moment -

simply, culture.

14.01.2017

Snow swirling,

writing in the air

between the grasping branches

tapping the sky.

13.01.2017

The Sweet Lie about Li Bai(701-762)

Once again I am reading how Li Bai

supposedly drowned while trying to embrace the Moon

reflected on the surface of a river.

This time, the writer tells how it comforts her,

that death she sees as pleasant concerning alternative

fates imagined up by Du Fu, his friend.

And I think how often I have read this,

this sweet lie, and when first I learned

- it was decades ago, surely -

about the letter Li Bai's cousin wrote of the poet's death;

that how after a long and painful illness

the poet expired at the cousin's home, in bed.

An ordinary death, the Moon hovering cold and distant;

no more poetic than dying

lungs full of water.

11.01.2017

An Epitaph

He - like you -

was nothing.

11.01.2017

Lost in the Landscape

A harsh gale blows through

the black-white land,

black branches dance up and down

naked, the snow long fallen.

I walk, what else?

From one point to another

in space and time,

an afternoon walk,

a life among biting winds and snow

to erase all tracks

after erasing the cause.

11.01.2017

Sometimes we need a Year Zero,

to guillotine the memories

and blow up the relics of bygone eras

of our lives;

let them collapse to dust

so that we can escape,

a hacksaw in one hand,

leg-irons cut from our feet,

for a brief dash to freedom.

11.01.2017

Afternoon pause

resting under snow

the town in January

a silence

of people in black

a rare car slowly

appearing disappearing

a slice of the sun

in the horizon

reflected on a mirror

tousled hair

a contented face

edging on middle-age

this life

that has become silence

between emotions

appearing disappearing

on the mirror

caress of the Sun

04.01.2017

The Grave of John O'Hara(1905-1970)

Writing his own epitaph

only ensured rebukes

left as final words on him;

you would have to be

Julius Caesar to be remembered

based on your own words.

He - a writer from Spoon River,

now dust begging respect.

02.01.2017

That Hideous Sight

The success of an author's career is based
and written in her or his face

in our times; or lack of it,

to remember Thomas Pynchon. He must have a very ordinary face,

a working class face - the face of a car mechanic

or a factory worker. Something

out of place, not fit to adorn

the back-covers of his novels.

We all know that an author of novels like his

must look like the professor

of a small town New England college with a fine pedigree

going back to Ralph Waldo Emerson's circle.

Ashamed, perhaps only after an intervention by a publisher

at the beginning of his long career,

Pynchon hides his features like a turtle inside its shell

to let his work live without the connection to a visage

that would drag them down with it.

He must often be mistaken for a retired plumber,

electrician or a train driver by cardigan wearing people

carrying his volumes in their hands

to read among falling autumn leaves

caressed by sunlight from a major Indie film.

How wise to hide, how disappointed we must be

the day we see his low-class features posthumously

revealed to the world, how disdainfully

people will turn away from new editions featuring

his face, that less than mediocre face,

that will makes us feel like we are
carrying dirt by connection,

unwashed, smelling of sweat,

seeking solace from the editions in which his

grim features have not been printed,

those unsoiled messengers of pure art

disconnected from an aesthetically unworthy author

more Hephaestus than Apollo.

01.01.2017

A firefly in the cosmic night

There is no death,

no 'great mystery',

there is life and there is consciousness

and there is an absence of consciousness.

There is the primal Nothing before the universe,

a state of unbeing,

and there is a state of unbeing

from which the consciousness emerges

from and subsumes into.

We are not.

We are.

We are not.

28.10.2016

Response to a poet wanting someone to remember us

There is no need for someone to remember us,

the land itself will remember us,

the rocks rich in fossils before us

and then the mass extinction

where abundance becomes scarcity.

Somewhere along there,

the last of us.

10.10.2016

when you read this

i was never intended for these things

so how could i have been good in this

yet i stepped in when i should have stayed out

stayed out and walked away

not to find myself now

with a bow and an empty quiver

standing before you

my Saint Sebastian

each arrow a word launched in error

each arrow sank deep into your flesh

when I tried to be Cupid and Wilhelm Tell

my beautiful martyr

21.09.2016

santoka(1882-1940)

poor old drunk

running away

into liquor

long roads

poems

scattered along the way

to that final night

when death blossomed

20.09.2016

William Hope Hodgson(1877-1918)

It's April

in Ypres.

Transfixed,

he hears the song

of the

arriving shell.

17.09.2016

The landscape moulded itself around you

in your vision,

in reality

you mould yourself into the landscape

but in the end

only the landscape remains.

12.09.2016

Tom Piccirilli(1965-2015)

God Bless America!

9/11!

Greatest Nation in the History of the World!

But when it comes the time

there's a brain tumour the size of a tennis ball

in your head,

it's time for your relatives to beg money

so that you could be treated

in the Greatest Country In The World....

One Edgar, four Bram Stoker Awards

and still you were just another

miserable poor bastard

stuck in a system

where making money on extending your life,

extending your death

was the real horror,

a vampire feeding on you

for every coin you had

and for every coin your friends and fans came up with.

"Give it all to us!" the vampire

demanded, and so

a little bit of life

was bought with much cash

and your death prolonged;

money bought you a twilight existence of pain

chained to the system

like a chattel slave, a goddamn

factory animal existing to make a profit

out of your own suffering for medical companies,

insurance companies, politicians.

It was the real horror

which caught you in its clawed limbs

and never let you go.

They sacrificed you on an altar for greed.

Manifest Destiny!

USA! USA! USA!

12.10.2016

The mist that remains

Now ghost among ghosts you linger

in silence among the graves,

among the whispers of the life

from whose cocoon you emerged in death.

The flesh and the blood another memory,

beyond the rebirth

shattered fragments form themselves

into visions of doubt and dream.

You once left footprints on sandy shores,

the low tide of life went and the high tide of death came,

and in place of footprints you draw

a vision of life from beyond death.

They come to your grave,

to that stone that hides

what time has not taken

and adore it with flowers and candles.

A cold wind, a falling leaf,

you wonder if you loved those flowers,

if you looked at candles on dark evenings

and saw what you can't see now.

08.09.2016

Of Lead Pellets and Iron Oxide Particles in the Autumn

Chilly morning, old coffee warmed

in the microwave, tired as

usual, a rusty leaf thrown to the ground

from its heights. The cloud

mass without features, milky white,

the coffee tastes bad, hot liquid

traveling down the throat

I think about the millions of magnetite

particles in our brains, how

we came to this, our brains

like Kashmiri faces after protests,

scarred, changing what and

who we are, our industrial civilization

living in us in our

post-industrial existence, 

like those eyeless children of

Kashmir and their comrades in

Palestine. The outside world

is blind, now the prisoner

like a ruler of old is blinded

to make the usurper safe.

A leaf, on the ground, yellow

beside brown. My feet are

now always cold, in this

world ruled by people

with hearts as cold as those

dug from chests on morgues.

Lead and iron.

07.09.2016