QUESTIONS FOR FOUR LATE MEN OF LETTERS

Question for Henrich von Kleist(1777-1811)

Couldn't you have

killed just yourself?

Question for Stefan Zweig(1881-1942)

Couldn't you have

killed just yourself?

Questions for Arthur Koestler(1905-1983)

Couldn't you have

killed just yourself?

And why did you

rape those women?

Question for Dazai Osamu(1909-1948)

Couldn't you have
killed just yourself?

13.04.2020

EASTER SNOWFALL

Snowflakes in gray April air

cold, wet falling in silence

on muddy earth and

gone year's dead grass;

soon running

ashen in brooks

and ditches beside

brown fields,

copses of skeletal trees,

the last libation of a faint winter

to call for resurrection 

the hidden sap and seed.

13.04.2020

THE GOOD PEOPLE

The good people

will never save

the world

that

needs to be saved

for them

by those who know

you don't defeat

human monsters

without

becoming one

the good people

will judge

from the safety

of a redeemed

tomorrow

11.04.2020

WITH LOVE STILL IN THEIR EYES

In the pale light of the

april morning

what can i say to

the dead living

in the air fainter

than mist

yet wielding memories

as chilled knives

cutting twisting

shedding essence

with love in their eyes

and their cold lips still

asking for help

silently still asking

for help

11.04.2020

WHY

Why do you support

liberation of occupied Tibet

if you believe in socialism,

you might ask?

Because I don't believe in China's

bourgeois robber capitalism

in communism's clothes,

nor in the right of Chinese nationalism

to crush Tibetan nationalism.

Let China have true communism,

and Tibet have its freedom,

and the liberty

to find its own way

to socialism.

11.04.2020

GATEWAY TO SOCIALISM

If you can't get through

Marx, Engels or Lenin

then read Dickens, Hugo and Zola.

Perhaps then after

Charles, Victor and Émile

you can go up the steps

of political awareness to

pick on your hands

Karl, Friedrich and Vladimir:

Great literature

is a gateway

'drug' to Socialism!

13.08.2016-11.04.2020

DEIR YASSIN 72

When 'Western' politicians mention the Holocaust

and Apartheid Israel in the same sentence

standing beside the Prime Murderer of Israel,

Palestinians die.

                           And the 'Western' leaders smile,

and they say "Israel is just defending itself",

and they shake hands with the Prime Murderer,

visit a museum for victims of a genocide in Europe

built to shadow Deir Yassin,

                                              where in 1948

Zionists killed over 120 villagers;

you need the memory of a genocide

to hide a massacre, and to 'justify' ethnic cleansing,

and defend Apartheid,

                                    and even that,

my dear 'Western' leaders, my dear Christian

Zionists, Jewish Zionists, Hindu Zionists,

Atheist Zionists and Buddhist Zionists and

Wahhabi Zionists and so forth,

                                                  even that

is not enough: A genocide is not a license

for 72 years of war crimes

and human rights violations.

Nobody, after all, has claimed

that Porajmos is.

11.04.2020

PARDON, BUT

It seems I

have lost my face

and no matter how deep I dig

I seem not to find it.

Please don't scream.

All I have dug up

are these masks of flesh

in my fingers

ripped from the bony cage.

Can I ask a favor?

Let me check

if under that face of yours

is mine.

20.09.2016

A QUESTION

Why we

never hear

about the

undeserving rich?

24.11.2017-10.04.2020

FEELING GOOD

You are happy,

riding the high

wave;

smiling,

laughing, joking -

this is a good day,

and I smile,

as your joy

makes me happy

also. 

Yesterday

forgotten, the hollow

emptiness filled. The

sadness driven back,

the wave

rising you

on it's crest,

like the best

surfer there

ever was. 

21.08.2018-10,04.2020

CHAMPIONS OF APARTHEID

So many people who in public endlessly lament

a genocide that blighted

the world 80 years ago,

are vocal, proud champions

for Apartheid and

ongoing ethnic cleansing today:

They are laying wreaths to memorials crying "Never again!"

while claiming that the soldiers,

who each day destroy homes,

and the secret police,

who daily torture captuired people,

are 'Just defending themselves!"

They say, these apologists for

killing the occupied

and their dream of freedom both,

the victims are to be blamed

for their own suffering,

and that their voices

must be silenced.

To these heralds of oppression

it all makes a distorted sense,

as past victims are today the oppressors,

and the tormented

lives of today's victims are worthless

- just faceless üntermensch to be

trampled under military boots of

the triumphant übermensch

and their need for lebensraum.

10.04.2020

WHAT THE WORLD KNOWS

Of justice the world knows nothing,

except that one thing:

That it must know nothing.

Of fairness the world knows nothing,

except one thing only:

That never must they meet.

13.09.2019

ALL THAT SLIPS BEYOND YOUR GRASP

Dreaming, misguided dust

given the shape of an ape -

that is you, human being,

slouching from the womb

to the colder rest of the tomb.

Aeons live in you, yet how short

is your voyage from the first

shocked cry at birth

to the last desperate words

you utter to the darkening world.

Dreaming, misguided dust,

made flesh and bone

and cast on this wandering star

to look in amazement and reach

for all that slips beyond your grasp.

14.09.2019-10.04.2020

LIKE SCIENCE, ALSO SOCIETY PROGRESSES THROUGH FUNERALS

A society progresses

through the funerals

of its elites.

Sometimes,

for the sake of the greater good,

it has to be

through mass funerals.

Don't be aghast -

every day on Earth since

someone first made

himself a chief,

has seen a mass funeral

of the common people.

A society progresses

through the funerals of its elite,

a society saves itself

through the funerals of its elite.

10.04.2020

IT STILL WON'T BE ME

I have lived too long,

but will be dead far longer,

through the death of stars

and dark aeons when

black holes evaporate,

until time with

cosmos itself ends,

and in some universe to come

a perfect copy lives

without making all the

mistakes I did.

09.04.2020

bound to fate

bound to fate

neither tears or laughter

neither life or death

matters

we know that tears

are truer than

the laughter

used to hide them

we know that death

always vanquishes life

that every struggle

ends in defeat

that in death

dissolve all tears

sound of laughter

life and death itself

16.09.2019-09.04.2020

the grave on the roadside

beside the road a grave

a shrine to beg for existence

from passing travellers

on way to their own ends

hoping for a morsel of memory

a flash of thought for the shade

to be stolen from death

if the hadean realm exists

as you rest beside the stone

from which time burnishes

away both a name and grief

give libation for the sake of your own shade

16.09.2019-09.04.2020

A LITTLE BALLAD OF SWIFT

The ladies good, and decent breeding,

they loved Jonathan Swift very much;

they wanted the dean to marry

and little Swifts in Dublin to make;

but Jonathan, he never liked

the idea of the ring to take -

half as much as the adoration

he got from his Vanessa

and Stella too. Perhaps in

him Bickerstaff knew

that worship can survive much,

but never a matrimony.

09.04.2020

EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL

All violence is political,

just as every act of making love

is political; no one ever

crushed a skull in hate

while being a bland slate

herself, no one ever

begetted a child without

the act and the birth

being played in his mind

across a mental scene

carved by the society

through the aeons.

09.04.2020

 LEARNING FROM HISTORY

A Modest Proposal; or, a Homage to Jonathan Swift(1667-1745)

Learning from history,

we should, like Sulla after taking Rome

did to his senatorial foes,

proscribe every billionaire.

A cleansing act of natural justice
unbridled, following

the great tradition of the

Western Civilization -

it was good enough for

Anthony, Octavian and Lepidus,

after Caesar had been slain,

to purify a diseased body politic.

We should proscribe every billionaire.

09.04.2020

THE LIBERTARIAN DREAM

To the endless shouts

of  'Freedom! and

'Liberty',

a corporate boot

stamping on a human face

forever.

The bloodier it

gets, the more

broken bones stick through,

the more profitably

'Freedom' flourishes,

'Liberty' blossoms...

08.04.2020

TWILIGHT

In our weariness we glimpse

that more than our years have made us old,

and sometimes the dusk falling

becomes dusk of the very world

itself, and not only ours.

For the mistakes we made are echoing

the mistakes of our species; flaws

chiselled deep in our being

during the long, hard paths

we took through uncounted lives.

18.03.-08.04.2020

OMEN: A Satire

To Sir Keir Starmer

Strangle the Centrist baby

in its rocking golden cradle;

for it's an Anti-Christ begot

by the billionaire Devils

to blight the suffering world.

Suffocate with a pillow not,
for this newborn beast
needs no clear air to breathe;
the hellspawn birthed by press'
midwifery needs its neck snapped.

05.04.2020

ETERNITY

We live but once,

but shall be dead

forever; never

the chains of time

shall unravel,

even when the

stars are dead

and black holes

evaporate; all

matter joins

us in death,

but time, time

goes on in the

vast cold.

05.04.2020

AFTER DUSK

The night has fallen

like death once shall fall,

a veil over vision and thought;

like the last images

flashing in a dying mind,

we gather in electric light,

as time creeps toward

the day's end -

this the true 'little death',

no moment of delight,

but fading of the light

as dawn is but a faint hope

across churning time.

04.04.2020

DEATH ETERNAL

No such thing other as brief as man,

who lives only in himself;

the other animals

have continuity in their species,

they know not their end;

but the human being

has solitude in his thoughts

that tie him to the body

alone in the onward rushing time.

Death eternal is the lot

of man; raising his skull

from the bosom of the Earth

it matters not how far

the stream of time has flowed

since his thoughts ceased:

Here is what remains of one

who lived in desolation

and has tasted death without end.

04.04.2020

METAMORPHOSES

You can't remain the same

person you are

in this world of change.

Either you remake yourself

like a snake sheds it's skin

or a newt drops its tail

when life so demands,

adapting,

or the world adapts you,

rips off your skin and

cuts of your tail.

Willingly or unwillingly,

the world shapes you,

and you go through transformations,

shedding skin and dropping tails,

until the final transformation

that sees you

decompose in your grave.

02.04.2020

THE GIFT OF PEACE WHICH TIME GIVES

As much despair and anxiety as we feel

living through these days of

dread and vexing times,

take heed that there shall come a dawn

when no one alive now shall be breathing,

when all the pain and loss and fear we feel

is but dead voices on

pages and files and film.

This is the gift of peace which time

in abundance freely gives.

27.03.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

when tomorrow comes

the male cat keeps scratching

the open bedroom door

demanding my attention

demanding soft food in a sauce

but the little rascals in fur

always leave part of it to dry

never touching it again

so sorry lad in black-and-white

it's just dry food today

you get your meat in sauce

when tomorrow comes

26.03.2020

SOON OVER

one fucking day again

soon over the night

black nothing beyond

this cell cast unlocked

in time and place. one

fucking day again

soon over and lost

like all the people

i lost in the nothingness

standing un-breathing

beyond the windows

and fragile walls

of brick and mind. one

fucking day again

soon over & me.

26.03.2020

I AM NO ATLAS KEEPING UP THE WEIGHT OF THE HEAVENS

To PRC

Gray, iron gray

late March sky

and here we are under

it, and under

the crushing weight of

our feelings; another

one lost, lost for

now - recovered,

at distance, briefly

like a cold lance of

sunlight severing the clouds

as a heavenly herald

of sharp and biting

hope; like that,

a joyous flood rising -

and then: breaking, snapping,

that pale golden lance;

that briefly, and

now lost again;

lost the recovered

one, lost like the sun is

lost behind those

iron gray clouds

kissing the mist

on the barren fields.

26.03.2020

THIS UNNATURAL SPRING

Crystalline light of the late March noon

caresses the bare trees

lining the muddy road;

light that would bring forth buds

of life, palest green on boughs,

if this would but true Spring be.

But the caressing hands of sunlight

under the pale blue heaven

work in unveiled winter

stripped of white snows,

and the Spring lies in the distant future

in this unnatural time of dying.

25.03.2020

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM THAT PASSES

Life is but a dream that passes,

a brief dream before the eternity's

chill withers and lays bare the soul

and to it shows the abyss of oblivion.

Like a ghost haunting a summer night,

the human being passes through the world;

the evening dusk birthed her,

the first light of dawn shall bury him.

Life is but a dream that passes,

a brief dream from which we awaken

not; we are cast into oblivion's embrace,

and all shall cease and be no more.

22.03.2020

WHEN THIS WILL BE OVER

When this will be over, many will be dead

and far more will be living,

and perhaps we will be on separate sides

then, one on the bank on which stand

the living, the other on the one

on which shall lay the dead. But

the river between will keep flowing;

the river of time, of life and death -

and one by one, all who will stand

among the living when this will be over,

shall cross and go lie down

with those who this plague will take.

22.03.2020

YOU LOSE TO YOURSELF

"I challenge myself", the young cocky voice

in the commercial says, full

of the ignorant arrogance of youth;

and I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw,

where to a marathon runner who declares

"I won myself!", a bystander

says, "So you lost to yourself?"

22.03.2020

IN THE SEASON OF DEATH

If death comes, it will come

like a season of death

after the long, languid days

of late summer;

abruptly the trees

are in autumn foliage,

cold wind is ripping

the branches clean;

a leaf here, a leaf there,

and suddenly a rain

of gold, red and brown

falling through the dim air.

Each one a death,

each one a life

lost, falling upon us,

or we falling among them.

21.03.2020

WE LIVE IN A TIME OF DISASTERS

We live in a time of disasters,

not the old comfortable catastrophes of the British,

but full blown apocalypses closing around us,

and truth to be told,

we are not just innocent

victims among the disasters,

we are not just pig-headedly

making them worse

by refusing to put the climate,

healthcare, humans and nature

- the whole fucking, bleeding planet! -

before the billionaires on their piles of hoarded gold,

no, we humans as species are

one of the disasters, scything down

flora and fauna and people,

riding our skeletal horse.

We are one of the Horsemen

of the Apocalypse, the vicious leader

of the pack, garbed in flayed human flesh,

vicious, merciless, suicidal,

leading the world to Armageddon,

through one catastrophe after another;

the eye of the storm, with disasters

whipping around us like hurricane winds.

21.03.2020

THE NIGHT CALL

To PRC

I awaken to the call at three in the night,

fight with the mask to get it off,

rush through the cramped room, and

it's salvage from wrecked lives,

to grab the phone charging from the laptop,

and, still trying to fully surface,

fumble with the touch screen

with my big, fat fingers,

until I get to swipe the green

and hear your voice, angry,

but calm, fully in this world,

rooted to it, and I am relieved

listening to your complaints,

relieved to say that I was wrong

and that you are right,

sorry for what I have done,

just relieved in the midst of the night

to hear your voice,

to know you are there,

you are there and talking to me

in this great night which briefly

in separation connects us again.

21.03.2020

NATURE KNOWS NEITHER PITY NOR JUSTICE

Nature knows neither pity nor justice;

life and death just are,

things that cease and an event that happens,

and then the things that ceased

feed those that breath and move,

until it comes to their time

to decompose for life to grow.

20.03.2020

AT THE TWILIGHT OF AN AGE

The time is late, the day is growing

dark; through the dusk

the first stars glimmer.

Cold are the stars that shine

over the fears and suffering of

the human race;

cold and indifferent like the

mute gods, on whose altars

embers of hope feebly burn.

Orphan in the vast cosmos,

lost on his wandering star,

the human race looks to the falling

night and in fear shivers;

the dawn is a lifetime away,

and whose unseeing eyes

shall not watch the sun rise,

whose cold hands shall not feel

the dew of morning -

no one knows. Death walks

among the orphan race,

and with chill indifference chooses.

20.03.2020