AFTER READING A POEM 'I HAVE NOT LIVED' BY A LATE PROFESSOR OF THE VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

There is a brand of man

who loudly claims 'I have not lived'

no matter what path

his life took; from love

to war and fatherhood and loss,

through toil and fame

he might've gone -

yet he claims 'I have not lived'

because life to him

should always be something more

and different. He

is the man waiting for a miracle

when living amongst wonder.

20.03.2019

THE BAYONETS OF WORDS

In each book we read

we find a slice of ourselves,

a revelation given

to explorers

who, in some distant land

to be named after them,

they suddenly see

their own reflection

on a pool under a roaring waterfall

or on the surface

of a still lake;

they traveled far

to discover a glimpse of themselves,

we read and in our solitude thought

are pierced

with revelations and forgotten memories

of our lives and selves.

17.03.2019

A WORLD OF ILLUSIONS ON A LATE WINTER'S MORNING

The wind throws the newly fallen snow up in the air like a child

in the mind of the human being who once was that child

and now gives the wind and the lost child a new life

together, united, the force of nature and the memory

buried in the flesh of a person too old

to let that child go free except in the guise of a winter's

cold breeze, throwing snow and laughing in the howling,

the mind weaving the two together as brief existence

as the wind and the snow, soon gone the way of Villon's

snow of last year, this brain that remembers

the child and Ovid on his bleak shore of exile

going through his own metamorphosis; we,

the brief figments of nature, brief illusions

captured to flesh and blood and bone and thought

in a universe that came from and returns to nothingness.

In our own illusions we see the illusion we are.

17.03.2019

ON THE SHORE

the moon, cold

pale disk in torn cloud-shrouds

between skeleton-fingers of bare trees

on a late winter night

sky a wasteland in

the brightness of its stolen /

gifted light; a mirror

for minds, sailing

above us here at the bottom

of the ocean of air we

fishes arisen from our primordial

home and dreaming of a greater sea

to leave behind, vast

emptiness to be the background

of our flying

beyond the bounds of mortal gravity

that bind us to

the fossil fate of our gilled matriarchs

and patriarchs of the salty womb

17.03.2019

WAITING TO JOIN YOU

We have to go, one day we have to go

and join you, join you who have left

us here in this, in this foyer where we

wait, wait for the door to open and let

us come to you, come to you

and then, then - will you be there,

will you be there waiting for us,

waiting for us or shall we stand,

shall we stand there in the desolation

beyond, in the desolation beyond

alone, all alone, all alone still...?

15.03.2019

It comes suddenly, that feeling of ground

suddenly vanishing from beneath the feet,

collapsing on floor in as dignified manner

as possible to avoid fainting, while the mind asks

"Is this it? Will it be my time, like it was theirs?"

Two days in a row, knowing the beginning

while not tasting the end, the world withdrawing

and enclosing in darkness like on those days

where the existence bloomed suddenly

after all sensory experiences and thought had ceased;

one day it shall not,

it shall not, and there will be the question,

again, and the answer will be death...

13.03.2019

SURVIVAL IN NUMBERS

Better to die standing than live on your knees,

said Emiliano Zapata, better

to live one year as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb

goes the adage, yet

if all decent human beings stand tall

and live like lions for the sake of humanity

and our planet Earth, 

then no chest needs to be pierced by bullets,

no limbs nailed to crosses.

11.03.2019

CHICAGO: A FRAGMENT

...and we talk of the Swede Carl

Sandburg's Chicago,

two hundred murders a year

on streets where trams, trains and horses

and a few thousand cars

crawled forth in a sea of European immigrants;

not one in four third-generation

in the great crossroad town

of rivers and railroads, dreaming

of endless growth, the emporium

of the West on the shore of its own Sea

and the future... Upton Sinclair's

Jungle where men and beasts

mingled in blood and the bloodiest

beasts climbed the skyscrapers

to the heaven of power long before Al

Capone with his syphilis wrecked body and mind

came along, not the cause

but a symptom, a parasite on a gargantuan Leviathan

gasping on the shore of its sea

it devoured with new neighbourhoods,

more museums and army garrisons to make money safe

from those that toiled for it, City Beautiful

for men in smoky rooms, long mustaches and long beards,

their tentacles running like their great Haussmannian boulevards

along the canyons where like sick and defouled river

the masses ran and were run over by cars, trams, trains and horses

and the power of the men looking down from their Olympian heights,

seeing nothing of the weary, dirty ants they

crushed with one step of their collective greed....

08.03.2019

ON THE CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS

This is the simple,

complex tragedy

of human relationships:

Around us people

we want to change

to fit our needs

wanting us to

remain changeless.

We claim gods

made us out of clay

so that we could

shape people in our

potter's wheel

and we claim

gods fired our clay

to keep people

unchanging,

uneroded by time.

08.03.2019

SUOMENLINNA

The Sun glitters on the waves

of the Baltic, a ferry

frozen near the horizon

a silhouette in black.

The old ramparts, empty,

rise in near solitude

as wind blowing from the sea

scatters snow in the air.

Something approaching

joy worms its way

through the sorrow

to the centre of thoughts.

How pure would be

the moment if I could nurture

and relish that feeling;

but it's joy lost too far in time.

You are dead, you that made

life fully a life are dead,

and so close

the silence, one step away.

The waves come heavy

and sluggish to the icy

shore, sluggish like

life ebbing away.

Yet like the bushes on the cliffs

the mind and the flesh

cling to this hollowed existence,

fearing the great darkness beneath.

07.03.2019

DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT

"It happens in a billion years,

you don't have to worry about it;

humanity will die

if nothing is done,

but you don't have to worry

because then you are dead and gone",

was said about the end of Earth

as the Sun grows old.

"It happens in a ten million years,

you don't have to worry about it;

humanity will die

if nothing is done,

but you don't have to worry

because then you are dead and gone",

was said about the end of Mankind

when the fate of Dinosaurs

comes from the skies.

"It happens in a hundred years,

you don't have to worry about it;

humanity will die

if nothing is done,

but you don't have to worry

because then you are dead and gone",

was said about the greenhouse

hell to come, the glaciers

collapsing into rising seas.

It all will happen to

different sons of Adam and Eve,

different daughters of Ardi and Lucy.

Your daughters and your sons,

close or far away in the branch of Womankind.

So don't worry about the end

of your line and the end of Humankind,

it will happen when you are dead and gone

because you did nothing

when you were alive and here.

26.02.2019

TO THOREAU

The land you so praised, the men

who dwelt in there in your time

- stolen land and

sons of thieves; a land

whose true names were torn

away, replaced with names

to sooth the minds
of heirs to brutes

who burned the villages of

tribes whose languages

and the land were one.

You praised what was

a blighted, lesser place

after a crime was done,

when the soil in its bosom

hid the bones of its true

dwellers. Oh, Thoreau

you made an idyll out of

a land in the shadow

of a genocide!

24.-25.02.2019

AT THIRTY-NINE

To P. R. C.

You are not too old, at thirty-nine, to

set forth on sails of hope

to something else in a land faraway.

You have left behind

the first raging bloom of youth,

you have not entered

the years when

hands and eyes seek out

the first gray hairs.

You are not too old,

nor too young, at thirty-nine.

You leave to arrive,

on sails of hope.

Is it an escape? Is it

a voyage of discovery?

Is it a leap of faith

into the unknown?

It's an act of courage,

and perhaps all of those above

too; when life has become stale

and all doors are closed

you make a new door

into the walls surrounding you

and leave. Whatever may

wait beyond, remember -

you made the door

where none was,

you opened the wall

and there, in that great

unknown, you can create

a life for yourself, land

on your feet or in arms,

and if latter, stand tall

even if keeping hand in hand.

You are, at thirty-nine,

the captain of your fate,

you have set sail

to discover a life

that will be your own.

20.02.2019

FOR THE DEAD

When you write

for the dead,

you write

for yourself;

there will

come a day

when you

cross from

life to death

and cease.

Yet the dead

read nothing.

The dead

don't exist

for themselves,

only for

the living.

So, now

you are the

rare dead

reading words

written for the dead.

19.02.2019

A MIDDLE-AGED MAN'S LOVE SONG

To P. R. C.

I will not be like Kafka,

who could find no woman to his taste

enough; I am, my love,

no Pygmalion seeking a female

only to be found in stone -

I don't seek perfection,

I don't demand unchanging beauty,

no maid and Madonna and Mata Hari

in one female flesh; to

be blunt, milady, I want you.

I will take you, if you have me,

I will stay along if you bear me

until I tire, fall

asleep and you

have to lay me down

on the same stone-walled plot

where they sleep. If

before that you regret

and say 'Go!' ,

I will go like an

abandoned dog

waiting its mistress

to call him back.

19.02.2019

TWO CONMEN OF OLD

You well-connected poets,

monks and samurais,

playing poor in Kyoto or Edo,

pretending you wouldn't

know from where to get

your next meal; all

an act, an artistic statement

for men who could afford

to turn themselves into actors

with the city and the street

their stage; no wonder

Baisao wrote about

young gentlemen buying

his tea, not of beggars;

no wonder Bashõ

though a small abandoned child

something he could leave

to die on the roadside

and write a poem about it.

Never in their lives

did they experience poverty,

which they mistook

with poetry.

19.02.2019

NARCISSUS IN POMPEII

Narcissus drowned in volcanic pumice

brought to the surface, resuscitated

to that eternal moment beside the pool,

the image and the man gazing at each other,

serenely, enticed, through two millennia.

A talented hand shall cover the scar

running across the figure,

unblemished beauty restored

to keep the hunter enraptured

with his own naked form.

19.02.2019

WORDS FOR A WORLD BEYOND THE FIREWALL OF DEATH

You are writing for a world

where you don't exist;

a separate world from this one

where you are the epicentre,

the mountain of Sumeru

with creation falling down

as your foothills;

the world that came

to existence in your mother's womb,

the world that will experience

Big Rip with your last thought.

You are not writing for this world,

but the world to come,

the strange realm without you;

there is no mathematics

to explain this strange space

where the centre of this world

is absent; no,

this world beyond understanding

with its own pocket-universes of minds

reading your words, sentences,

your poems cast

into the alternative dimensions

where no cyclical process

shall bring you back

from the void.

19.02.2019

ART CONQUERS DEATH BUT MIND, ALAS...

The words of the

celebrated dead

are alive to us,

but dust to dust

when it comes to the

hands that wrote the letters

and the minds that created them

and weaved art out of sentences.

The past lives only

for the fleeting 'now' of today,

beyond past is dust to dust,

and tomorrow we

shall be ash, dust and bone,

mute memories of the gone.

18.02.2019

AFTER THE ROBES OF FLESH HAVE BEEN SET ASIDE

What garbs of flesh

we have while we breath

and think and waste

these fleeting years

shall be set aside

in the cold earth;

from under these guises

of faces and names,

bodies beautiful

and decrepit,

only our common humanity

in bones shall be left.

On this pedestal of death

you see solely human beings.

18.02.2019

COME PALE MORNING OF WINTER

Come pale morning of winter,

come the silence of the landscape in

dreamless sleep, come

the desolation that grips

the mind like ice the frozen ground.

This short day, under

overcast skies born in gray light,

with its slowly flowing time 

a stream that carries us,

without helm or sculls

down, down from the heights

where our home in time and space

once was, with faces loved

and lost, with voices comforting

and silenced. Lost, we castaways

in this world grown lesser

drift through this vast cut

through our bleeding self

towards the evening dusk

and the greater darkness

that lies beyond the night;

there, flesh and thought

shall be torn away

and at last pain

shall shed us in the void.

18.02.2019

THE CARPENTER AND THE SMITH

I was the smith who made the nails.

With my nails they crucified the man

from Nazareth who rode on a donkey

through the gate of Jerusalem to his death.

I saw him, enraged, in the Temple before
that day on Golgotha came

and I knew I watched a man whose days were few.

I was the carpenter who made the cross.

Good, stolid wood that could have raised

the roof over a family house for many years.

Instead it raised a man up in the blood-dripping air.

What a waste of good wood,

to put a man between earth and heaven
as a sign to all.

I was the smith who made the nails.

I was in the crowd that shouted for Barabbas

(for when given a choice we know that there

is no choice, that is implied) and I shouted with them.

I chose Barabbas, because there was no choice.
Roman steel told to that to us
and taught us well.

I was the carpenter who made the cross.

I watched my cross being carried to the hill

and him on his last travel before darkness.

When the crowd shouted, I shouted with it.

When the crowd spat, I spat with it.

When the crowd threw stones, I threw with it.
This is the wisdom granted by Roman steel.

I was the smith who made the nails.

I saw those nails of mine hammered

through flesh and wood. Deep

did my nails go and they kept a man suspended

between life and death until death won

as the soil under my feet shook.
Even in the shattering of the land they held.

I was the carpenter who made the cross.

I saw my cross rise against the blazing sky

with flesh nailed on it; a man beyond life,

not yet embraced by death; I saw

and watched soldiers throw dice,

felt the earth tremble and heard his final scream.
Even the agony of the soil didn't fell my cross.

I was the smith who made the nails.

Well did I make my nails,

well did they do their work.

Many a house, many a barrel

have my nails held together,

like it held him to his fate.
Yet I feel those nails crucified us all.

I was the carpenter who made the cross.

There is no shame in working and shaping

the wood into a cross; the only shame

is in its use, to bind a man to his death

with wood and iron nails,

to bind we who watched his passing
to some mystery that eludes us.

17.02.2019

THE JAVELIN-THROWER AT TWILIGHT

To my father

Sun going down, the land

in deepening blue, the Moon

stuck in naked branches

beside the road, the empty

road, beyond the forest

rises up the hillside, on the

ridge the highest firs

bathing in orange fire,

calm, silent twilight

at five pm, a moment

if not beyond time, then

in time crawling in

deep, blue snow as

Sun falls to other skies.

Absent, the human

- whose loss is a javelin

piercing the landscape

with the burning

embers of the Sun -

with crossed hands

sleeps, beyond time

and almost alive

in these moments when

the eternity stands an

atom's width away.

17.02.2019

MATSUO BASHÕ ON THE ROAD

Sleeping beside prostitutes

in the roadside inn,

something to do while away

from the capital,

to write down,

weave few poems

out of it; not

something to do at the capital,

to talk to,

sleep next to common prostitutes

when you

have invites to poetry night

after another at fashionable villas,

Moon watching trips

with people of 'standing';

no, this is

just a bit of exotica

for the poet samurai mistaken

for a monk

living on the roads

instead of just tasting them

to feed his poetic stream.

17.02.2019

SHADOW OF GRIEF

Well, it's a nice mid-Winter day outside

and you, you are dead,

not sitting at the garage on your chair

enjoying the Sun, with

the dog laying near you

in love with the snow.

You should be there, sunbeams

in your eyes, glittering

snow seeded with diamonds

forcing you to look away,

at the shadow you make

on the snow-covered ground

with your chair, silhouette

extending to our

memories, our lives,

that long silhouette

growing to a shadow

full of sorrow.

In that shadow

we will fade

and perish.

17.02.2019

LIKE DEW IN THE MORNING LIGHT

Poetry took a misstep

when the poets stopped

making their poems meaningful

for their audiences,

and began a Gargantuan effort to

make them meaningful

for themselves; they

wrote about themselves

for themselves, and as

the poets' understanding

of their work and self grew,

the audiences went the way

of dew in the morning light.

Sons and daughters

of Pantagruel, stop!

17.02.2019