A LAMENT FOR A SINNER AND HIS SIN

Surely this has gone for too long,

this what they call 'life' -

a cavalcade of days in distress,

mistakes that end in funerals

which follow you from one

dreary season to another one in darkness,

evenings sitting with a cat

in an empty playground reading books

while mosquitoes buzz in the air.

Today it was Weber and a biography about Brodsky,

yesterday Grass and... I have forgotten

(if it wasn't Lowry and his Mexico

through a tourist's brief, drunken gaze)

just like I have forgotten, have forgotten

most of these last two years and five months

since that night when everything

was on balance and was shattered.

Forgot to be able to survive if

this is survival, this mummification while

still alive in a horror movie way

(you like them, my poor lost visiting star,

yet they scare you and you wanted,

but no more, for me to hold your hand

afterwards, afraid to go to sleep);

the pain that comes each moment of

waking into another pointless day,

the hour spent fighting with depression

before getting up, getting coffee

made and, back from the toilet, drank,

getting the computer open, books

perched on its side, medicine

for the crushing pain which the one

well-developed part of me, conscience, gives.

Forgot to survive, me the forgotten.

"They left you here

so that you would not be in their way,

they buried you alive, your family,

you will die alone" she says. Perhaps.

Perhaps hermits are made as much

as they choose their lot or "life",

that great charade, guides them

to their cave or anchorite cell.

Whoever closed the door and locked it,

whoever bricked the wall, here

I am like Julian of Norwich -

without the seekers outside the

cell where she slept in her own grave

atop the bones of her predecessors.

I am dying alone, with three cats,

and you, my Fata Morgana

whose fate I have stepped on,

crushing it. "I have so many dreams",

you said and each time

I remember, I have tears

in my eyes, and like a stone laying

heavy on my chest. But you, my

sad, doomed dreamchaser,

you say "You don't love me.

You don't care about me.

You care only about yourself.

Get away from me!"

So I will die alone.

But worse than to die alone

is to die with someone

who could have saved you, would

have wanted to save you

but didn't; one wrong person

to be with on that final day, one

who had three chances to save

you, but like Saint Peter the Apostle

denied Jesus three times, he

failed you three times, three times

he missed an opportunity

that would have seen you sitting

out in the early night air today,

drinking coffee in the light

of the northern summer night

with your dog on your side

in the terrace; you wouldn't

have many years to live,

in your age and condition,

but you would have had these,

you and your loyal dog on your side.

12.06.2019

A WISH

Let me sleep

a cold dream

of a mountain stream

frozen, until

the past is here again,

when the graves

are empty

and the dead breath

and ask from us,

"Where have you been?"

08.06.2019

04:00 a.m.

At four a.m.

drinking two or three hours old coffee

from an inherited mug

I watch pink clouds

through dark green foliage of trees

as lone car roars

through my memories -

so many of them, like random

photographs picked from albums

and thrown on a table, my

mind at this late hour of consciousness.

Each moment folding

to this one, where like an ancient

insect in Burmese amber

I drown beside a fallen feather,

broken.

08.06.2019

TIME AND THE HUMAN BEINGS

Time shall belong to man

- Dylan Thomas(1914-1953)

It's not time which belongs to man,

it is man who belongs to time

(and woman and child),

and time shall play

with him for a moment,

and then it shall crumble him

in its hard hand

and throw him away.

08.06.2019

A SONG FOR THE SPECIES

Ancient oceans roaring in our blood

we stand on eroded mountain ranges

sheltering the graves of aeons,

our flesh shaped by a billion births

and a billion deaths separating

us from the sea from which we came,

a million deaths and a million births

keeping us apart from the great forests

in which we first walked on two feet

on mighty branches, balancing

life and death with the abyss of space

opening under us, as now

an abyss of time gapes on all sides;

here we are, still stones in our hands,

still gazing at the stars at night

shining through the lights of our folly,

still dreaming, grasping up

from one element to another,

with individual lives falling away,

stages in the species' flight through time.

07.06.2019

WHY DO WE LIVE ON?

Life is too heavy a burden

to carry on days like these -

but death is nothing. In

the void that is death

the memories which torment us

would die with the consciousness

- and with the memories

those whose loss is the pain

which carves our mind apart

would die a second death.

We live to remember them

whose going to the emptiness

made life this unbearable grief.

In our sorrow part of them

still lingers, in our suffering.

05.06.2019

MIDDLE-AGE CRISIS

Sign of the middle-age more than the white beard

on my chin and cheeks,

or perhaps of early

onset of dementia: I am

reading the plays of Shakespeare

and enjoying them, no

longer rebelling against each page,

rushing to write with poisonous quills

diatribes against the Bard.

(Once those words, 'the Bard', made me

see bonfires of plays and sonnets.)

I am truly lost.

05.06.2019

THE UNHAPPY SPECIES

So much of their short lives

they spend making themselves

unhappy, human beings,

and the altruistic souls

they are, also others -

a human being crosses

all obstacles, goes

throught the proverbial gray stones

to keep himself lost & hopeless

and others miserable, his victims

and his tormentors,

for as he is given he gives.

05.06.2019

TO P

This June night, these

White Nights of summer hours,

dark like those

of autumn, here stand

black silhuettes against

darkest blue;

here we with words

and fears

dig graves for dreams.

There is a scent of the autumn

in the breeze that rustles

the boughs and the mind, of withering

and fading of life,

amidst the bursting life of June

lost in the darkness too great.

Part of the future that

was to be

shall not see the morning come.

Lesser beings will

face the rising disk of the Sun

with fainter hopes

and greater pain.

Here we give birth to them

from our skin.

04.06.2019

DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

Calvinist piety made the Dutch churches bare

and the bourgeois merchant fat and smug

in his ample black clothes on the canvas;

he had made himself the saint

of the new Protestant age

and as patron paid for his own adoration.

No longer he had to kneel

pious in one corner and pray

for some obscure martyr massacred

he barely knew where;

now the brush worked whole for him

- as long as the far-sailing

ships of East Indies and the Caribbean

didn't sink. Even when all was pre-ordained

fate still played dice.

01.06.2019

A LETTER TO FRANCOIS VILLON(1431-1463?)

You vanish from our view like a thief

out of a burgled house at night;

no clerk raised an alarm,

no dog of parchment barked;

you vanish, made your escape

- to the gallows, we presume.

We can't imagine you, Francois,

repenting and living to an old age

of fifty or sixty as some rural

parson or a city clerk;

we can't, we won't -

we have given you a role,

and a role comes with a last scene

to crown you with your tragic fate -

and what is a bad boy repented

but a disappointing bore to us?

Your life, Francois,

was a Brian de Palma movie:

In a long death scene it must end.

Somewhere you slowly turned

in the wind, rotting -

this fate we have assigned

to our thief, lost in the mist of time;

but perhaps it was an easier death

that came to you; in some

cheap tavern a knife

between ribs, or

feverish last days hallucinating

at a monastery infirmary,

a town hospital for the poor -

or perhaps the plague,

that came to punish the sins

of the wicked nations of Europe

again on the blessed year 1464,

covered you with boils

and took you to meet

the men you killed.

Perhaps that death

we, the adoring generations,

could accept -

even a priest on the death-bed,

if one could be found

or some saintly foolhardy Franciscan,

to hear your confession

and give you hope of Heaven

via the divine tortures of Purgatory.

That we could accept,

if some doubt could be cast,

whether you really repented,

or like Pascal thought

it wise to believe

and cast your religious dice

on the Catholic God.

As long as it was

cinematic enough

we can give you that,

de Montcorbier or Loges

or whatever your real name was.

LORD TENNYSON'S OAK

Page after page of guy in love

pretending to be talking to an oak

hearing it, eyeless but seeing,

praise the loveliness of his girl.

Four or five centuries he makes

the oak be, but thrice as beautiful

than any it - eyeless but seeing -

has ever seen his girl to be.

Talking to an oak, hearing

it to speak? One mad lad -

whose girlfriend too might

as imaginary be as the speaking oak.

31.05.2019

SURVIVOR'S LAMENT

Perhaps we left too much of ourselves

behind in the times gone, or

perhaps we went too far in time

from where our real abodes were;

we lasted when the world of ours

wilted, we breathed when our

lives turned to dust. Living

ghosts of what is no more

we might be, orphans of those

years when we had a place

and reasons to live on. The

landscape of our mind evades

us, locked in time lost,

thus we endure, living revenants.

30.05.2019 

ON A LATE MAY EVENING

A sunny evening, a warm evening

in a landscape newly clothed in green.

Green and gold, and shadows short

under the high, high Sun.

Along the long, long road to walk

in this warm, warm evening

yellow suns of flowers

stand short like shadows safe from hands.

No one to pick them up

and place in a glass of water

to die rootless and far from the soil

from which they grow bright.

Green and gold, and hue of orange,

the Sun in the trees nests.

Warm along the ending road

the little yellow stars burn.

29.05.2019

THE SON OF THE DEVIL IN DEATH AND MEMORY

The bastard whose ancestral feet trod urine

in death burst forced in his sarcophagus.

These things so often forgotten

like the blood shed beyond an arrow

that may have never found Harold's eye.

What stand are facades in words,

a thousand year of kings and queens

chained to power through umbilical cords.

29.05.2019

SEASON OF THE MIND

Sun high in the early morning sky.

They say it is summer now.

Looking at the calendar, spring.

Based on the weather, summer.

But in my lacerated mind,

with all the empty places

in my life,

with all the graves,

it's a bleak October

of endless cold rain

through a windswept

night which no

dawn breaks.

19.05.2019

SPENDING AN EVENING BESIDE THE NURSING HOME

The world has ended, the world has ended for me,

yet this warm May evening

sitting on the bench in the sun

as the shadows lengthen,

drinking coffee

has its charm.

Yet the lost

are not far; thirty meters

and there they are,

in the buildings where their lives

in different ways

took their final paths.

I feel that there they are:

one in bed, another

working in another room

beside another bed, 

waiting. Waiting

for me to stand up,

walk fifty meters

to the main door,

go inside

and meet them.

If I stand

up,

if I stand

up

and walk

to that glass door

and open it,

If I

let my feet know the way

on those corridors

to them, then

I know,

I know

I am dead.

How I

wish I would

stand up

and walk

there.

19.05.2019

IN A MORTAL COSMOS

Nothing we do

will have a lasting effect

in a mortal cosmos;

yet, even waves

set to fade

to the immensity of an ocean

matter, for as long they exist.

Impermanent has its value

- and demands on the sentient.

Even in this cosmos in which

we briefly flare up in the deepening dark

and fade away,

even in this

we have our duty

as long as we

gaze in the night.

Even in our cosmos which

is not a moral cosmos,

guided by supernatural rules

or higher goal, evolving

to godhead,

even in this

there is meaning

in the human scale

of things.

It just is,

our cosmos,

our womb and our prison,

allowing life to briefly

struggle, flourish

and wither,

until it is no more.

In those moments

between two greater voids

than those between the spider-web

of galaxies

we must carve

our destiny,

mortal like ourselves,

transient phenomenon

on the foam of space-time.

It must be enough,

it will be enough

until nonbeing.

12.05.2019

LIFE AS PURGATORY

Another bleak spring

with cold rain growing

towards a summer of

bitter memories. Grief

rules the life now, gripping

our minds in a tightening

hold; we are lost through

our mistakes: Purgatory

without no exit to Paradise.

Here we suffer,

here we wither

from season to season,

echoes of the years

that were.

11.05.2019

SHADOW IN THE COURT OF GOOD KING FORTINBRAS

The good king Fortinbras,

the gift of fjords and fells,

after much bloodshed came

and easier than Caesar took.

A foreign king, but

kings are always aliens

to the people their crown

commands;

they stand apart,

they bleed apart,

they lay in state apart

and rot in crypts apart

from those their sceptre

orders and sends to war,

scaffold or to glory, like

that ghost of a court past,

Horatio, shadow of the

mad prince; a warning

more than adviser he stood

on Fortinbras side -

reminding the son of

the northern wastes

how princes go astray

and kings are slain.

10.05.2019

SANDBARS SHIFTED BY THE SEA

People are complicated,

everyone knows (except,

perhaps, about themselves)

- but the problem is,

they, we are complicated

in illogical ways

that shift from day to day,

our personality but

sandbars shifted by the sea.

10.05.2019

A THINKING MACHINE'S INCAPABILITY OF UNDERSTANDING ITS OWN END

1

The human mind can't comprehend

it's own non-existence;

an organic thinking machine

never at rest -

how could it visualize

itself stopped and decaying,

the world outside

(whose reality it so often pondered)

going on, complete and whole

without the one

it sees as the top of the Chain of Being?

2

Learned monks

and mystics

seeking 'non-existence';

all you seek

is death,

termination

of all that meditation,

koans and poems

of God as Lover.

It comes to all,

oblivion, dear

seekers of inner peace.

But inner peace?

Peace like a star

collapsing

under its own weight

into a black hole,

vanishing

from the universe.

What peace

is there

in singularity,

in death?

10.05.2019

THE DWELLER IN JOY

THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD ANTHROPOID COFFIN FROM THE GIZA PLATEAU (CIRCA 8TH CENTURY BCE)

The face smiles,

a happy smile

on a face whose

colours have not faded;

three millennia of joy

on a mummy coffin:

Smile that tells

of faith; of belief

that the heart will weight

as much as a Maat's feather,

that the spirit

will dwell in the Field of Reeds.

06.05.2019

THE SAGES OF THE BAMBOO GROVE

Ruan Ji was

drunk for two months

and wandered unwashed

among the hills and the streams;

Ji Kang, unbending,

didn't spare brave words

and played his zither.

But they both died:

The man who
became drunk

and the man who

stayed sober
- the same year
saw them dead.

06.05.2019-01.06.2022

Ruan Ji(210-263) and Ji Kang(223-262) were Chinese poets, members of the group known as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. The latter was executed.

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

TO P. R. C.

So you want a poem

not for you,

but about you,

as you nibble at your

piece of cheese,

laying on your back

on the bed

with sunglasses on.

The sun is long

gone from the room

left in shadows.

But you shield

your eyes

from me,

nibbling

on your cheese

like a little furry

mouse, eating

a piece

of the golden

sun.

06.05.2019

DEATHBED

Through all the miseries of life,

the struggles, the defeats and the

bitter victories, we

have come to this moment

when it all ends: All

those days of tears and cries,

all those brief joys

which we made

into a chain of decades,

all of that, ending

to vanish, erased.

Was it worth it?

Until this moment,

until this moment

but nevermore.

06.05.2019

THE LIBERATION OF PROMETHEUS

To gain freedom from eternity of torment

he must give the tyrant an eternity of rule;

he who once stole the fire

as a gift to humankind

now barters with the one 

who denied the fire

and chained the fire-bearer,

sending eagles to devour

his liver

day to day

at high Caucasus.

A name is exchanged,

Thetis.

An immortal son, king of gods,

trampler of Zeus,

shall never be;

a mortal with a fatal

weakness is destined to

kill and die.

Thus the despot

of Olympus wins

and the fire-giver

is broken.

03.05.2019

THE STORMS OF A LIFETIME

Oh the mess we make

of our little lives;

such grand emotions

like rogue waves

over such little words

and lesser deeds -

in those we tie

ourselves and our fate,

like a seaman

to an anchor.

Down, down in the

depths we go

in our furious feelings

like a drowning mariner

- while the anchor,

rusting emblem of

the petty storms

of our existence,

safely lies on shore

as a sailor's pillow.

03.05.2019

VOIDBORN

From void to void,

a mirage flickering

on stage descending

to the all-obliterating

void that spawned

you both; all

existence begins &

ends in the void,

birth & annihilation,

annihilation & birth,

only void.

03.05.2019