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

THE TAILORS OF THE SEASON

The birds' songs give

leaves to the skeleton branches of

trees; garb them

in the clothes of much

later spring. The water

in the river runs cold
- the sound of the black

stream is all about the

season barely started.

Sounds give the

naked emperor Spring

the clothes she still lacks.

27.04.2019

MIDDLE-CLASS IN LITERATURE

Enough of middle-class middle-aged men

and their crises, enough of middle-class women

approaching middle-age and their doubts;

it's all middle-class masturbation

by middle-aged (literally or figuratively;

you know middle-class ages people faster

mentally than hard physical labour physically)

authors writing to their middle-class peers,

dull like themselves, without importance:

"I'm middle-class and I drink too much alcohol

and I have an affair although I am outwardly

happily married and have a good job! Poor me!

Let's have 300 pages of this!"

Fuck this shit and off with their fingers

and their computers, off with their entire class.

This middle-class bourgeois realism

needs to burn!

25.04.2019

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF

What is the meaning of my life?

you ask, and another,

What is the meaning of the universe?

You both ask for an explanation,

a reason why things

have come into being,

why they matter now

and some goal
their continued existence
reaches for.

You want a reason

outside your own existence,

outside this universe in which you exist.

Some great reason on another brane

to give meaning to this all.

Yet meaning is in the things themselves,

as long as they exist.

Existence is meaning,

and explanation? Biology and physics,

with sprinkle of mystery.

You, this being in time and space,

create meaning through your existence.

There is no greater arc,

pre-ordained for you to follow.

There is no map but the one

you draw as you go through

the universe.

Universe whose meaning 

is in its existence; two things,

one sheltered in another which

it's part of it, and the other

observing its greater self,

drawing maps on human joys

and sorrows, of stars clusters and

super-clusters of galaxies.

Both have meaning

in their existence,

bound, and none

beyond the ripples

in matter, space and time

which that existence creates.

25.04.2019

THE RIGHT AND THE CENTRE

We must not pretend that all people are good;

that conservatives are not evil, that centrists are not weak

when it comes to spine and morals;

that hard-right wouldn't be just far-right under another name

or that centre-right wouldn't starve a child if they could.

A conservative loves a bomb, a centrist pretends to love

a bomb so that those who love a conservative

would love him too; centre-right loves a bomb

because a bomb can replace a backbone

and hard-right loves a bomb because "Deaths!", thus Aristotle proves:

That conservatives, centrists, centre-right and hard-right

are just one and the same, flavours of the

same shit, with one tasting like crap, another like faeces.

They unite, come apart and join again, you can't keep them separate.

Their merry dance is danced around suffering of humankind.

23.04.2019

EASTER

Somebody died for us,

they claim and find it comforting:

Somebody loved us so much

that they died for us!

Not since our parents died,

has there been a person alive

who would die for us.

We matter, we matter

so much that someone

two thousand years ago

died for our sake.

But that someone

rose from the dead

and lives forever,

unlike our parents.

Our parents who were ready

to die for us, and who

did let their other dreams die

for our sake,

our parents dead

shall not rise. There

is no Resurrection for them,

only the grave.

It is them we truly want,

returned to us,

but denied that joy

which would unite

adult and child,

we look at a cross

and an empty grave,

imagine that that somebody

will be a replacement,

somebody who loves us

like only our

parents have.

19.04.2019

OF GENOCIDES AND THE 'WEST'

If you worship one genocide

with crocodile tears

and impunity for an Apartheid State,

you don't have do to anything

to stop the genocides

taking place now.

This is the

understanding of the 'West'.

18.04.2019

FATA MORGANA

That quest that drives us

through this life we think eternal,

to have meaning, a distraction

from mortality and the void,

from the truth that this is a

mirage shimmering on desert

where everything dies.

We say we want to

achieve something in life,

but life goes away

and there is nothing.

There are no achievements

in oblivion,

no meaning.

We have been erased.

13.04.2019

TRANQUILITY

An oasis of calm in the

late winter night;

all my dead resting

in peace in my mind

I am left free

to be devoid of the

tumult of emotions -

the daggers of grief

taste no bitter blood,

no self-pity garbed

in the memories of

past more real

than the husk

I inhabit on these

wrecked days.

No, in this timeless

dark I am

at anchor on a windless,

waveless ocean,

the depths below the calm,

flat surface hold no

terrors. I am,

I don't feel,

thus I am in peace.

08.04.2019

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