I was thirty-eight when for the first time

I did not get any gifts on Christmas.

I could not expect any, in the circumstances;

I was not sad; yet in slight melancholy and nostalgia

I had to reflect. A turning point in life.

I had passed through
one of the little crossroads of life.

31.01.2016

We need a new
Lenin in every country.

We may have to shoot them afterwards,

but we need them.

But no Stalin.

New Stalins need to be shot now.

29.01.2016

King Charles I on January 30th 1649

- or an ode to an axe

When a ruler's head doesn't bend,

it needs to be cut off.

28.01.2016

Ode to the October Revolution

The world

needs more

Jewish bolsheviks.

28.01.2016

A Dream

During last evening's hopeless sleep

I found myself holding brand new novels

by Jean Genet, hardbacks with

red, smooth cover papers.

I was, I noticed, in a library.

Why Jean Genet, I wondered, why now?

I woke, remembered the

library book I had lost,

its rough, brown-yellowish soft covers

holding inside the birth of a revolutionary spirit.

28.01.2016

Listening to Dowland,

drinking old coffee and lemon tea without sugar,

trying to read

a path through the hours of the night

between pale blue covers,

until a late red dawn sets snow on fire.

28.01.2016

Poetic was the death of Poe

Poetic was the death of Poe:

A slave at last

the supporter of slavery,

drink after drink down his throat

and a change of clothes,

taken to vote

again and again,

the sacrifice of the Great American Author

for a little political gain.

Poetic was the death of Poe.

28.01.2016

Ars Poetica Spatia

A poem without a message

is a scream in void.

A poet without a message

is a cosmonaut doing

a space-walk without a suit.

The former isn't heard,

the latter doesn't survive long-term.

Thirty seconds in the void

screaming and heart fails.

28.01.2016

To Michael McClure(1932-)

The only thing your cigarette was an emblem of

was and is the bloody cancer -

and your black lungs. Art

has no need for the devices of a suicide

to represent it, death in form of smoke

to creep inside, to worm its way into cells.

27.01.2016

Peter Orlovsky(1933-2010)

In a relationship of two poets

one has to be silent,

in the background,

the one who needs to be identified in photographs

showing them together.

As the work of the prominent partner

rises in quantity and appreciation,

in its shadow the poems of the other

grow few; one day

a young disciple of their partner

will ask from the loyal companion

"Do you write?" and

is answered "I did."

26.01.2016

Tomorrow will be gone,

yesterday wasn't here -

the human existence,

a thought between voids.

26.01.2016

16 & 22

Young lives lost in blood on muddy native soil,

"terrorists" scream the colonists who took photos while they died,

bled for forty minutes in the cold and the rain

while foreign medics proud of not treating the natives

were caring for their lightly injured fellows.

25.01.2016

from nothing to nothing

you are not

you are

you are not

so simple

but facing it

non-existence

you need to give

fear a good kicking

to keep it down

your loved ones

faced it

they are no more

you have to have

guts to accept it

the annihilation of self

the annihilation of being

24.01.2016

In the kitchen, lost in night time

Blood from the gums paints the

bottom of the kitchen sink red,

dark blood, iron deficient,

with those deformed red blood cells,

too few white blood cells

making from their part life what it is,

sleeping and being tired,

handful of pills keeping going

from nightmare to another one without dreams,

a fragment of death, void,

annihilating hours.

22.01.2016

A scene from Yemen after Saudi-Arabia's air-strike

Rag-dolls covered in plaster and dust,

painted with bright red here and there,

broken, blasted open skull or abdomen,

the fragile biological machinery stopped,

the mystery of consciousness ended.

Only death remains in the ruins.

22.01.2016

In the light of the reading lamp

On the bed, early Friday evening

and the black of winter night a wall behind every window,

water flowing to the sink in the kitchen

to keep the pipes from freezing and bursting,

and in 1944 New York rag-tag losers stumbling to murder

inside the yellow covers of the novel I'm reading.

I have no sympathy for Lucien Carr.

An awful killing, drowning a wounded victim,

makes sympathy impossible.

Somehow they are all lacking something essential

to humanity, these damaged people

rising to greatness in literature -

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and the lot.

Somehow they could not see themselves,

hands bound, bleeding from chest wounds,

regaining consciousness in the cold, dirty river water

with trousers' pockets full of stones.

They failed there. Fuck you Lucien Carr, you little rat.

Fuck you and fuck your loyal friends.

22.01.2016

Michel Tournier(1924-2016)

At that age

your path's end

is a summit of loneliness

to rest on

to gaze at what

is behind

your life a landscape

being lost in mist

of distance and time

22.01.2016

Humans trying to become god-like

and god trying to become human,

missing each other somewhere between.

19.01.2016

A World Ending

Thoughts drift like snowflakes

in the pale, faded blue

arranged over this freezing day,

these anthills of homes

among snow and trees,

the concealed faces

on the slippery streets of ice;

the darkness before and

the darkness coming,

these lives slipping through

the cracks opening

everywhere you look.

A world ending

with no news of a coming birth.

19.01.2016

Finland 2016

The future, sold,

shall always be

worse now, the Golden Age

lost in old 80s photographs

and memories of youth.

But watch your daily dose of unreality TV,

read about how much cleavage

celebrities have shown yesterday,

remember to hate the refugees

and support joining NATO,

celebrate ice hockey victories

like they would give something to you,

be the sheep that votes

for their own slaughter.

19.01.2016

TO WISAM MARWAN QASWANI

Wisam Marwan Qaswani(1994 - 17 January 2016)

No headlines for you,

Wisam Marwan Qaswani,

unlike for the illegal Israeli settler

killed the day after you,

in the so-called 'Western' media.

The indigenous gets the silence,

the colonialist the clamour.

No headlines for the brick-maker boy

shot by someone who wanted

to kill a human being

and no longer could control

the evil growing inside him or her.

They killed you, and they get away with it,

they get away with of letting you to bleed death,

there on the ground of your own land,

your blood on the soil of your native land.

As the stream of innocent blood shed flows, 

the anger grows. Hate that makes the fingers

pull the trigger to kill brick-maker boys

makes steel find its way through soft flesh.

Blood calls forth more blood,

said Alcuin of York.

Hate calls forth more hate.

Death calls forth more death.

Your death calls forth more death,

Wisam Marwan Qaswani.

The hand that made its finger pull the trigger,

the mind that sent the order to the hand,

the human being, lost inside his or her uniform,

is a future killer of so many fellow Zionists.

19.01.2016

All for them

Start the long goodbye,

wave already

when you see them coming

just to make sure

it will be done,

seeing you in good spirit

will please them,

smile so that

it will be captured

in a photograph

when you still can smile.

Hug, when people

still dare to approach you,

when the "death

is a contagious disease"

thought hasn't taken over.

Give them a good

final moment

when the pain is still controllable,

and then,

enter between the white sheets on the bed,

allow the tubes to be inserted,

wait, while death stays with you

as they all go away

to life, abandoning you

to the final moment

when the disease is in control.

15.01.2016

AFTER THE DEATH OF THE STARMAN

To David Bowie(1947-2016)

We are dead now

the great secret is open

and our mouth can't talk

our lips frozen in that final expression

our tongue

a dead piece of meat

it's all locked inside

tunneling into the after-life

we fragment

into shrapnels of memories

11.01.2016

Of Time and the River of Life

On and on the river of life flows,

and we who emerged from it,

swimming against its current

for those fleeting moments of breathing,

we are bones in the embrace of time

on those shores which

the river will never flow past again.

10.01.2016

Nefer from the night came

From the night, the little wolf-hound runs

to the light, the open door,

over the black pools

gray wanderer of starless dark,

from the embrace of the woods

to the safety found

under the kitchen table.

10.12.2015

Zionism

Must evil be allowed to be exist

only because it's evil made in name of Jews and Judaism?

Is it really 'lesser' evil then,

because Star of David shelters those who do it?

Or is all evil equal, is it true that

the background of evildoers

can't raised be as a shield to cover them?

Humanity, I ask you - are we all equal?

08.12.2015

ON OUR TV SCREENS, THE PLANES ARE LAUNCHING

Now to war we go -

and war is a necessity and a joy,

truth a collateral damage with the kids

of the tormented, torn flesh

with their eyes forever closed -

until one day, one day

we shall shake our heads,

look around and regret,

and wonder and say never again,

until again the fever shall catch us,

that eagerness to see the planes take off

and headline claims of many bad guys killed,

the information a solid mirage...

06.12.2015

THE BROKEN PUZZLE

If I don't appear contradictory,

you have misunderstood me.

Those, who push a straight path

of thought through this world,

make violence to feeling and

reason alike, forcing unity

where character fragments.

06.12.2015

On Independence Day the opinions of the very old

are suddenly gold; on lesser days

those who cherish them on that one day

cut and cut to make their last years hard,

yet on Independence Day flocking to hear

what grand words these untended totems of the past

have to say in their one day of glory out of

three hundred and sixty-five.

06.12.2015

The open veins of the world

sending waves of red

to carry us all forward

into days of future death.

06.12.2015

To Dino Barberini

Rest in power

Freedom will come,

freedom will come

and you will be there smiling, Dino,

among the crowd, under the flags,

you will be there smiling, Dino,

when freedom comes to Palestine.

30.11.2015

No ethnic-religious grades in suffering

They tell me "it's a different thing"

when Jews are oppressors instead of oppressed;

I see no difference -

oppression is oppression -

and thus they call me an anti-semite,

and oppression "self-defense",

like the past oppressors of Jews

would not have had their own vocabularies of justification

that attempted to make wrong right.

It's always "the same thing". Always.

Your suffering is no more important or less important

than anyone else's. To know

and acknowledge this is to have conscience,

empathy, compassion, humanity -

things that Zionists of all hues lack.

26.11.2015

If I change, if I am not who I was,

if it's a different me who again and again

steps in the cold stream and feels

the polished stones under his feet,

my toes,

if,

then the mistakes of the past

would have not been mine

- then I would be a victim

of those past incarnations,

abused by those vanished men

who left me in their skin.

I refuse that.

I am the sum of my past errors.

24.11.2015

TV shows indoor cycling, web wants to tell me

what new there is about Paris and Raqqa

where once Harun al-Rashid had his court.

Bombs are falling, I wonder about making coffee

but there's little milk to go with it, so perhaps

I just drink some water, mug or two down

my parched, swollen throat as explosions

lighten the skies and how many forcefully conscripted,

how many enslaved die with those in black masks tonight?

Its not that I don't care about Paris, but

what about Beirut or Baghdad or Yemen -

eight months of war and the allies of the "West"

have not made a single move against al-Qaeda or IS,

but of that we must be silent, because even after Paris

geopolitics and realpolitik reign supreme.

Don't hold back emotions, let them guide

your support to our rulers, those who have none,

that's what they want from us, in tricoleur

supporting more war while our leaders and our allies

spare no thought to bringing peace forth in place of war.

15.-19.11.2015

Brief, brief the light of a November day.

Low, low the milk-gray clouds.

High, high the swift birds rise.

Among the mud and the rain

the fallen leaves decay,

among the mud and the rain

the dead grass lies.

Pale, pale the light of a November day.

Cold, cold the wind over the fallow fields.

Slow, slow the rain falling on naked branches.

19.11.2015

All those Yankee Rangers and SEALSs

like insects limbs cut of in hands of boys just being boys

and why not, they are not fully human,

perhaps not even part,

rabid Yankee stains on the globe.

19.11.2015

INTO THE NOVEMBER NIGHT

The afternoon falls into darkness

and fog, November evening

a brief walk, through muddy pools,

into the starless night. Somewhere

along the way I lost what words

I had gathered from among the shadows.

16.11.2015

Paris

Making history with bullets,

painting the path to greater war

with blood, bodies

as signs - "Go to Syria"

and Hollande, after the

death of the victims and the perpetrators,

"We will be merciless."

In Raqqa the wounded self-declared Caliph

must nod in approval;

what is loss of Sinjar compared

to the deaths that are to come?

So the red rivers

to the ocean converge.

14.11.2015

SULAIMAN IS DEAD

Sulaiman Aqel Muhammad Shahin, age 22.

Another death.

Another life taken.

Another car riddled with bullets.

Another body laying on the ground

within a circle of colonialists.

"But we are the victims!" say the colonialists.

The living colonialists, each with their gun 

nd their smart-phone taking a trophy photo.

The living colonialists, on occupied land illegally,

with the native dead in their feet.

Yes, they are the victims, because...

because they say so.

We must believe it.

We must repeat it.

Because otherwise, antisemitism.

Sulaiman is dead.

We see him in photos

making a joke,

with a baby in his arms,

sitting with a Fatah flag behind him,

laying on the ground, dying or dead.

I condemn Israel.

I condemn Zionism.

There are no victims among adult colonialists.

Israel has no 'right to defend itself'.

Sulaiman had a right to live,

Sulaiman had a right to live free,

Sulaiman had a right to live free in a free Palestine.

Sulaiman lived his entire life under occupation.

Sulaiman is dead.

Palestine lives.

09.11.2015

Support the oppressed, oppose the oppressors.

Don't let love or hate blind you.

You can't go wrong.

09.11.2015

At the heart of life

a growing void

where memories like cliffs

by the side of a sea

fall eroded sinking

beneath the waves

of lost past.

06.11.2015

Fields of late autumn,

birds circling in silence

hung between

frost and cold sky.

06.11.2015

Let the world take your pain away

and give it back to you

magnified, with a rosary.

06.11.2015

To Pablo Neruda(1904-1973)

So they killed you Pablo

took a few months or perhaps a year

from an old man fearing what you would say

out there in exile again

racing against death and dictatorship

So they killed you Pablo

they killed you

but here you are still

living in millions of hearts

on pages uncounted

we feel your heartbeat

your voice rising like the tide

on the shore of the Pacific

immortal enduring

sending still lovers into embrace

revolutionaries onto streets

engraving the fallen into collective memory

of the people

06.11.2015

the naked branches of trees

along the edge of the clearing

in the silence of a November afternoon

begging something

to come out of the fog

the frosty ground

06.11.2015

a mat of fallen brown leaves

all over the green moss and dead grass

all over the green moss and dead grass

a mat of fallen brown leaves

like memories atop memories

05.11.2015

Fashionably politically incorrect

Burning the intestines of

Michel Houellebecq

while life still flickers

in the eyes

of his castrated body.

Martin Amis,

alas, is already dead,

suffocated

with his own shit

in a pool of his own vomit

and urine.

There they lie,

side by side,

the fallen weasels of literature.

05.11.2015

Third Intifada

The least that Palestinian youths facing Israel's bullets with stones in occupied E. Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza deserve is that the world notices them

Look at them, the Palestinian youths whom Israel's friends in the "West" would happily see occupied, imprisoned & caged all their lives.

If you are not going to help, at least acknowledge that they exist, that they matter, that they bleed, get wounded, that they die.

If you are not going to be their ally, be at least witness to their courage, their moment of defiance, their wounds, their deaths.

That's the least which can be asked from you - that you open your eyes, look and see these youths' ongoing struggle in the same world in which you live.

25.10.2015

Tom Disch(1942-2008)

One day Tom Disch,

Tom Disch the once good author,

Tom Disch with the great future behind him,

stopped spouting racist vitriol in the web

long enough to notice

that most he hated himself.

BANG!

24.10.2015

Those who claim

that suffering ennobles

have never suffered.

Suffering breaks,

twists, crows ice around

your heart,

makes you lash out

in anger and pain,

makes you someone else.

23.10.2015

The only thing we really need

until the end

is hope.

17.10.2015

Be the final wave

to come up to my shattering shore,

sweeping it away

in your embrace.

17.10.2015

Immortality in literature

Blessed is the author

known by the future generations only

from her or his great fame

without having any surviving work

to blemish it.

14.10.2015

The Nobel Prize for Literature

The only prize Philip Roth deserves

or needs is a

castration without painkillers

and having to eat his

dick raw.

14.10.2015

Gaius Cornelius Gallus(70-26 BCE)

1

You should not have been so eager

to wash away the shame of ambition

with death's bitter remedy,

as at one pentameter and nine lines 'of inferior quality'

stands your lyric legacy

after time more merciless than Octavian

has wrought its punishment

and left these as your poetic monument.

2

You should have pushed death's release away,

put words down and sought Octavian's forgiveness

as poet through flattery and praise,

and your political ambition

would have been forgiven if not forgotten,

your ambition to be remembered as a statesman

buried, like those nine lines in the sands of Nubia.

14.10.2015

Peter Whigham(1925-1987)

Oxford, I read, and sighed

and was ready to consign you

to one of the lower reaches of

Dante's Hell, but then those

redeeming words "largely self-educated";

no Don then, from privileged background

taught by Dons from privileged backgrounds

lecturing youths from privileged backgrounds.

Curse the Ford of Oxes.

Sleep well, or travel

from Purgatory to the Celestial Paradise.

14.10.2015