THE AEGEAN DROWNED

The sea like a demented mother

carries in its Homeric embrace

the bodies, rocking

their pale flesh

in its faded wine.

Some late, lost

retinue returning

from fallen Wilusa?

Or were they twice

refugees from Yarmouk?

Time, turning

on itself,

forgets.

In death

they are one.

25.01.-28.01.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry

BETELGEUZE

We sentients on Earth eagerly hope

that Betelgeuze would blaze

brighter than the Moon

on our sky.

See a supernova!

Who were the last to see one

in our spiral cast in the night?

The peers of Brahe and Kepler!

We, motes of dust,

in our swift darting

from oblivion to annihilation,

yearn to witness a greater death than ours.

In our dream to see

the sky made anew by a visiting star,

we think little of the motes of dust

on whose skies it would shine death.

In the funeral pyre of a giant

we would doom them, sentients

and those still grasping for the flint and the flame.

For if we could, we would make Betelgeuze die.

28.01.2020

FEAR AND HOPE

All hope

comes with fear,

the amount

just differs;

but far

more rarely does

fear come

dragging hope with it.

20.01.2020

SAIGYÕ IN OLD AGE

After forty years

spent growing old

as a monk and a poet,

the shogun

still saw in him

just the dead

emperor's bodyguard.

31.05.2014-17.01.2020

THE CENTRISTS

Given a choice between Utopia and Dystopia,

they vote Dystopia and say

it's the realistic choice to make;

better not to reach for things hard to achieve

and instead embrace what we already got.

17.01.2020

DAY LIKE A DROWNED RAT

The pale, short January day

dies a long death;

hours washed off and yet

the light lingers, gray, as the

raindrops keep falling on

black trees in the soaked landscape -

which the less than gallant night

finds itself most hesitant

to embrace.

17.01.2020

IN THE TIME OF THE FLOOD

To P. R. C.

Your distant words are hope,

even in the knowledge of my betrayal,

precious like snowflakes

in this flooded landscape of dying.

This land sinking in mire

when all should be frozen,

and I given your words,

precious even at this late hour.

No roads leading away to those scenes

in time and place we call the future -

except the ones we make, and

I, I build lanes ending in cul-de-sacs.

16.01.2020

JANUARY

January desolate lies

beyond the glass,

barren in gray and white black

darkens. Time towards

the end crawls. January

endures, I shall not

in my aquarium of brick

and glass and despair.

11.01.2020

WHEN THEY

When they erect the crosses,

better be a Barabbas

than a Jesus.

To hear the crowd

call your name

to cut their throats tomorrow

better than to carry

the cross and the wounds,

the nails in your limbs,

than to linger

in the heat of the day

and the cold of dying.

11.01.2020

TIME

Time is a landscape

in which we

get lost

without a map

or a compass.

We wander

in circles,

we stand in solitude

until the dusk

brings forth the

starless night

and all is black.

11.01.2020

ON THIS FINAL SHORE

So much

has ended

without beginning.

11.01.2020

TRUE

Life is an aberrance,

a glitch in the cosmos.

Non-existence is

what is 'natural'.

Death. Humans

and universes,

less than fireflies.

Nothing. That

is what is... lasting.

True.

11.01.2020

JULIAN

With a spear the torrent

of fanged change

runs through those

who try to challenge

its set course to the night.

10.01.2020

US

of us

nothing will

remain

the great

and the small

the pathetic and the cowardly

the valorous and the saint

we all

go down

the drain

of history

time

flushing the toilet

10.01.2020

DECAYING IN CHAOS

The wise and learned say

that time doesn't exist,

and on these long, dark nights

between gray days slept away

I believe that we are indeed lost,

cut from the order forced by mind

and drifting beyond the end

and the beginning, decaying in chaos.

08.01.2020

OUTDOORS

Following my own footsteps

in the melting snow

at eight in the morning

and I'm already tired

of this fucking day,

let it melt away,

this time and land of pain,

let it melt away,

this life of pain

endured and caused

like the snow melts

at eight in the morning

in the bleak January.

07.01.2020

NOT FOR US

There will be better days

and nights of delightful joy 

- but they will not be for us,

no, to us the bitter memories

of when we followed mirages,

dreaming those coming times

would be ours to live

as we wandered astray.

07.01.2020

IN THE FINAL WINTER

These latter, bleak

days fall

like crumpled leaves

from the young oak on

the front yard of

my old, true home

fell on the late snows

of winters past,

dead and dry and

on touch falling

into pieces. Thus

the aged branches

of personal time

become bare,

never to carry

buds again.

11.12.2019

LOST

TO P. R. C.

A dim October dusk, sipping

coffee from a thermos I walk

through the bleak

evening weaving night.

Liquid warmth to burn

a freezing flesh and chilled mind

forlornly thinking of you,

flown faraway and lost.

I have the falling dark,

I have the emptiness

left by your leaving,

torn fabric of the world

flapping in the breeze.

I have bitter coffee burning

in my mouth, something

to numb the thoughts

against the falling leaves and snow.

07.10.-10.12.2019

ON THE BRINK

The darkness falls, finally,

the blessed lack of light;

the pale, gray winter light

that still evokes all that is lost;

the darkness more gently

hides that what was

and the ruins of lives remaining

on the brink of the devouring abyss.

10.12.2019

When you have died

you have never lived.

You are not dead,

you never existed.

09.12.2019

You are gone.

You are all gone.

What

am I doing here?

What

am I doing here,

alone?

You are gone,

you are all gone.

Why

am I here?

Why

am I here, still?

Because of sins

and guilt.

Because sins

and guilt

must be

paid for.

09.12.2019

SPLEEN

Gray light and silence

behind the window

where December lives

in absence of movement

and sound. An

impressionist painting

on glass, muted. Let

us forget this hole

in our cage, the

illusion of a world

it offers in three colours.

This is all there is,

these dusty rooms

where the electric light

hurts tired eyes.

09.12.2019

THE BLACK HOLE

Death is what happens

when the world ends.

The core of existence

collapsing into singularity.

No thought shall escape

the event horizon of being.

No white hole shall

provide escape.

09.12.2019

LIVE

Life is what is,

nothing much

but it is.

Death is what

is not anything,

it is nothing.

Live, for something,

these morsel days of ours,

are more than nothing.

In the end,

the end that is everything,

we will be nothing.

07.12.2019

GRAVES OF FLESH AND THOUGHT

We are the grave

of time,

each day buried

in our depth

for life

to move past its losses.

We are tombs

made of flesh and thought;

days and years and decades

hiding in us,

and the people forever

lost in that past in us.

07.12.2019

IN THE DIM GRAY LIGHT OF THE DAY

Another day

of dim gray light,

few hours
spent traversing the waste

between the going

and coming

of the darkness

of the winter night,

between the gray-white

overcast sky

and the white-brown earth.

Worse these hours

than the utter black

of the long starless night,

these cursed hours

gray, white and brown

full of bitter memories

of loss and knowledge

of where the fault lies;

the long night

in its abyssal depths

better hides the truths

the pale, brief day

dredges to its feeble light.

07.12.2019

AFTER THE LIGHT HAS GONE

It becomes easier when the light

has faded

and darkness falls.

It is easier,

in the dark,

to live.

Yet the knowledge, the memories,

they stay there,

in the mind -

always present.

Not shouting, yet

talking, whispering, crying.

In voices lost,

in voices lost

because you were not

worthy of them

that depended

on you.

They who made

their leap of faith,

those who expected,

those who deserved

after decades

of sacrificial love

a modicum of what they gave

to you, year
after year after year,

to you who failed,

who failed them all.

And your own voice

among the others,

self-pitying, crying,

pleading, pathetically.

No longer screaming,

but whispering, the weakling,

in the dark in which

you hide from the pale light,

pale and feeble light

like the blood in your veins,

like the brittle moral spine

long ago broken,

you, long ago broken,

hiding in the dark

from them who
you betrayed.

06.12.2019

NOTHING

Nothing is eternal

except

oblivion.

05.12.2019

ALL THIS

All this

is just a prelude

to the void.

Galaxies, stars

and you, a firefly

in the cosmic night.

All this

is just a prelude

to the void.

05.12.2019

THE VOTERS OF HATE

Those who now embrace fascist racists

are not ignorant, they are not

mislead innocents:

They are as guilty as those

who will with their votes

doom us all.

They embrace hate,

they embrace denial,

they want us all embrace oblivion.

Curse them, these

people who dance with the devil

and their coming excuses

how they supposedly didn't know,

when we all, we all

know what the sons and daughters of Adolf sell.

They shall not be forgiven,

they deserve no pity,

for they are with open eyes destroying us all.

05.12.2019

THE MIRAGE

It's the mirage of

from which you

seek comfort:

That what you create,

in thought, steel and flesh

will survive your end.

It is a mirage

that you embrace

in your desperation;

you know,

you know very well

that nothing,

nothing you have done

and placed in the

quicksand of existence

will survive

your death.

05.12.2019

ALPHA AND OMEGA

The days that we gain strength

from, the long days beyond

our consciousness' reach,

when we are not and the world remains -

do they really exist?

Is the hope that we can't share

hope at all, are the days

we can't live days that really are?

Island universes of thought,

bound in mortal flesh inside caves of bone,

what hope to us if what we distort

in our mind lives beyond its annihilation?

02.12.2019

RILKE

In the gardens of countesses angels

came to him in visions,

and belief in god flowed in his verses;

but when cancer spread across

his flesh and bones,

angels, god and verses streamed no more

and silence came before death.

25.-26.10.2019

DECEMBER NIGHT

the deep elemental black

of a december night

has warmth

which the

brief pale gray

day lacks

like heated oil

waiting

to burst

into flames

16.12.2013-18.10.2019

october morning

morning

no dawn

of pale embers

in the horizon

burning

just cars

migrating

in small herds

in the black

night lasting

18.10.2019

OCTOBER MORNING

To P. R. C.

Another bleak morning of gray light,

wretched to be awake

to greet this drizzling dawn

drinking warmed up bitter coffee

alone with the cats, you

gone and lost to silence,

the dreams of the long sleep ended

filled with the longed-for dead

and their now unremembered words

erased by the surfacing

from the abyssal realm of slumber

to this ashen, watery morn, this

what goes as the reality

and is a purgatory for the

half-damned burning in their sins.

17.10.2019

THE POET AND THE BADGER

In memoriam Edward Thomas(1878-1917)

They dug out and killed the badger

in the dark and ancient combe,

they killed the poet

on the chalk plateau at Arras,

shot him in the chest there

where men hid in the ground

like badgers to escape death.

16.10.2019

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

DEATH IN WINTER

Day spend in bed reading,

drifting through an alien winter;

day spend in mourning

people and mistakes

that kill and estrange people;

day spend drinking coffee

black as the night and the mind,

day spend with closed curtains

to hide from the gray light and the dark.

Day and life, life and day alike.

16.10.2019

JUST LIVE THIS DAY

You shall not live forever,

you shall not die today -

put aside your sorrows,

do not look beyond today,

just live this day

without watching past.

The days without you

will be without end,

the world beyond the wall

of death shall not exist

more to you than you to it.

So just live, live this day.

16.10.2019

BUBBLES IN THE VOID

Our life a bubble soon to burst,

our cosmos a bubble in the multiverse

- a child's soap bubble floating

in the air has same reality

as the galaxy clusters, universes

sprouting, growing, dying.

Forget it, live, embrace

the illusion. Escape

until the bubble bursts.

15.10.2019

DIDN'T GO

I cancelled, didn't go - why should I

take that long walk there and back

just to hear pointless talk

from lips behind which

no knowledge of this exists?

Just an absolute vacuum of solutions.

It's a theatre of the absurd, a charade

worthy of Beckett and Ionesco

and so forth, a facade acted out

so that all can go on pretending

- except you, who flew away.

And for what?

So I laid on the bed in your scent,

with the cats on my side,

surfed the web until slept

again till night had fallen,

awakened from seeing their

dead faces alive again,

and it was dark, the pale light

of the brown and gray day

no longer whispering

of what should have been

and what was not done.

Purgatory of the starless autumn

night had engulfed the hell of

the bleak October day

and already I cursed the weak,

pointless dawn to come.

15.10.2019

october

birches

have but few

bright yellow leaves

left

beside the firs and pines

dark in the pale light

of autumn

05.10.2014-14.10.2019