SQUIBS

 

Mutter, ich bin dumn ("Mother, I am a fool") Nietzsche

In Hyde Park a preacher took a pratfall up to the moon from his soapbox,

and everybody laughed in China.

Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for a gardener. And Jesus, timely, plucked a rose.

Definition of glory: graveyard wherein the soil falls 

upward instead of downward.

He wanted to leave this world through the main gate, in grand style, but eventually

popped off through a pop-hole.

He wanted to be laid to rest with his loved-ones, but ended up with the hated-ones.

In that country a poet was off his leash, and mauled another poet to death.

Studious-looking by the river the poet,

in reality only flicks through dirty mags.

Nobody gets shipwrecked twice in the same island.

Ignorance is recyclable. Knowledge, biodegradable.

It takes so long to be not an idiot, and only a second to become one again.

They wanted me to be an early riser to catch the worm...I was the worm.

Cadaver dogs still sniffing around in search of his missing soul

The universe is nothing more than an upscale dunghill. That's why in Ancient Egypt

they worshipped the dung beetle as a sacred beast.

"Je voudrais être un cochon: l'homme seul peut être ridicule".   Paul Gauguin 

The State is an Amusement Park full of over-rational children.

"The law is the Amusement Park of Pain"  Louis F. Celine

"the beautiful fiction of the law"   Charles Dickens

I am my own booty of my own piratical forays into myself.

Someone was tampering with the course of the universe when I was born.

In my late childhood, I was convinced that dwarves and cats-like the universe-

never die.

Impossible to poem the memories of all my imaginary loves.

"With an apple I will stun Paris"-said Cezanne.

I will stun London with a durian.

I've been always a wanderer around the words, not the world. 

A skating minister stopped and pissed

over my blue bonfire.

Please mind the gaps between your steps and the clouds.

The words also get exhausted as the pilgrim's feet.

I was born at rest, unrest.

Today everything is quite similar to everything and nothing at the same time.

I am a defendant accused of being just me. The Devil's always offering

to be my lawyer pro bono.

Death by poetry is a kind of death by misadventure, that is, "accidental death caused

by a risk taken voluntarily"

"I'm going to do with ya what the moon uses to do with poets: ignoring'em." 

Everywhere you come across idiots who believe themselves poets, and poets who deem themselves as God. 

We are all putty in the hands of a playful and mischivous God.

We are all sitting ducks of the Fates.

""We know that the Muses were women, and we know every day of our lives that the Fates

are women"   Charles Dickens

We are only status updates posted by God daily. And daily disappearing.

Nietzsche defined himself as "a fatality in pyjamas". I am the selfsame fatality but in boxers.

"Dieu etait un tres mauvais communicant"  (Michel Houellebecq)

Every war that breaks out in this planet is a cut of God having a clean shave.

God takes a potshot at us every day.

God don't play dice with the universe but marbles.

I suspect God is a serial killer running away at light speed. He will never be caught.

God is a technocrat who trades in the stock market of suffering.

"In the beginning was the word"(John, 1:1)... 

But God keeps flannelling on and on.

"J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise"  Arthur Rimbaud

God, in the other life, was a stand-up comedian.

Written off as a suspect of murdering God,

the philosopher was declared caretaker God.

Earthquakes are the sneeze of the Devil.

"Satan's bet is still on"   Alberto Manguel

There might come a time when all the human beings can be bound in brotherhood...The endogamy will do the rest.

Birds will never nest wherever people want.

And people will never know whatever birds think.

Humbleness hardly ever bloom in the genius as a rose-like virtue. 

Rather as the last resource of the defeated.

Definition of life: a mighty polygraph that someone lays hidden in the words.

She told me: "I like you just the way you are". She should have told me, "I don't like the way you will be"

Tourists are the absent-minded inspectors of Hell.

"Tourists are souls doing penance"   Adam Zagajewski

Hope is carnivorous.

Hope is a woman in broody urge who, sadly, becomes childless.

"The dead hunting and the alive, ahunted"  Frank O'Hara

Death is an endless Sunday.

Many men deserve l'oubli but l'oubli deserves so many men?

I am my own scarecrow shooing away the thousand crows of my anxiety.

 

You searching for the exterior, and the exterior searching for you. Crisscrossed screams. The bridges burning.

I've just hit the nail that rounded off my crucifixion.

How do you intend to turn transcience into beauty if you don't know what is it as yet?

It is not about to get lost in the woods anymore but in the stars.

Falling apart piece by piece, 

peace by peace 

All books of poetry intend to be a clarifying footnotes of dreams.

"Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure, not its influence

 as religious or political propaganda."    Sylvia Plath

The exile is born and die endlessly in a lifetime.

Impossible to unearth the gold of facts.

Fate is the mother of things.

This business of living is becoming, day by day, something quite spatial more than special.

They don't bring children to this world anymore but books.

He wrote his curriculum vitae in several heavy volumes, 

and won the Booker Prize.

The world is a hankie teeming with virtual snot.

"The world seemed made of concentric circles of mockery"  Susan Sontag

The present is always crammed with insurers of insecurity.

"Hey wooden boy, don't get so close to the flames", told off Pinocchio a tramp warming his hands at a bonfire.

Anyone scared of the unsteadiness of the ground has the right to believe himself an orangutan, and never to climb down from the trees.

"Are we alone in the whole universe?", asked me a tobacconist while I nibbled on a bacon sandwich.

What is the point of knowing if we are alone in the whole universe, if I don't know why I am alone in myself?

I've just decided to live off-the-grid and off-the-greed.

ON A WICKER ROCKING CHAIR...

 

On a wicker rocking chair

grandma takes a breather at noon

fanning her jolly smile of moon

with a piece of cardboard, the air

teeming with glowworms and dust.

The fan stained with sunflower

oil. 

      In the porch shaded by a bower

of orange jasmine,

                           she smells the gust

of perfumed rain and mangos and sea.

Flies and words land upon her fan.

She talks with herself sipping tea:

"What a scorcher"-and stares to the sun

glowing red through the sky. On the rocking

chair my grandma nurses a nap stroking

my straggly hair, a black cat.

                                             She beguiles

the boredom with a big moony smile.

THE LAST DREAM OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

 

 

"Thinking of rodhodendron forests in Piccadilly" 

(Virginia Woolf)

"In broad nightlight 

                                  tonight

conversing with the realm of darkness

my words have taken in the colour

                                    of rhododendrons

bordering late-blooming paths, 

                                          abandoned castles,

mossy bridges where the crows

                             land and brood at sundown.

In broad-dimming nightlight

shall not come the moths

 to flit around the tired splendour

                              of my words,

words tinged with the pale pink

through which, oftentimes,

                    the faces of memory

entice Hebe into the forest of Elvedon,

faces as pure as the stork flight at dawn, 

                   faces that whisper me with voices

of blue-girl in darkness...

this is you around, Percival

this is you, Rhoda?.

faces that mutter me beyond any matter

through a seraphic language

                                   of wave or ringdove.

And I whisper back to them 

                        like buttlerflies smouldering

 in the candle flame to be ashes"

THE GOLDEN BOUGH

 

He lost his soul

walking into the woods

but he realized the woods

 itself was his soul

and while losing his bearings 

in the dew-laden thicket of larches.

pines and elms

 he came across a golden bough:

 Aeneas-wise, tried to break it

and somehow to descend into the Averno

and bestows it upon Persephone hands 

in return of kissing her asphodel-scented nipples.

He couldn't tear the golden bough

apart from the bark 

and it dawned on him that bough

was not his fate nor even descending

into the Averno...Let alone

to kiss gloriously a goddess

in the inglorious darkness.

POEM

 

A roll of fog over the downs

smelling of sea.

A flock of green starlings

outpace the sun,

the sun still yawning 

among the wet aloe fronds.

A mopish bobcat stares

at the fleece-like clouds,

his slick yellow eyes

 plumb the depths

of beyond...

And there, uphill, nearly floating

over the fog in motion,

with invisible scissors

I snip the stars.

SYLVIA

All the monkeys of Emile Borel

now are tapping away 

randomly

at my keyboard

pulling off the love poems

I was not ever talented

to write

(for thee)

POEM

 

A Claudian sunset

a punnet of fruits on the windowsill,

a white nag can be discerned

grazing afar along the horizon:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

Undulations of shaded valleys and reveries.

A moon-caressed gnomon

as the phallus of some forgotten god,

god combing the goldfields of memory

where, naked, cavort 

all my past and imaginary loves.

Susurration of willows over the gleaming water,

stentorian voices of rivers that swell in the night,

the night coming down like a wound tiger

who stares, melancholy, the orange gloam of dusk:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

The dreams I didn't dare to make real

have turned into crows.

THE BREAKUP

She turned up all of a sudden

as a broken fingerpost announcing

the safest path to nowhere.

And she smelled so good

 in the summery breeze

as the poems I have no written yet.

But she glanced at me like someone

that scrutinizes a face 

of a missing person in a wall flyer.

On the tarmac, kissed by the rain, 

still glistened the shadow of her last word.

POEM

In military fatigues, the poet

trains his metaphors

to survive banality, transcience, void.

Unfazed by the noise of defeat and rain.

Inebriated by his own daydreams.

Though the golden spark, lost,

and the undertow of sadness, stronger:

he does not raise yet the ad digitum

to the shadows.

He still dreams of swanning off

with a mermaid, even brushed by age.

A belle dame sans merci

Enthralling the path without path,

the preordained beauty of love

with deathless death and no love.

                                                                      

*

His uncertain voice

besought to a certain night:

'What's the smell of the hours passing?

Has the touch its own memory

as Keats said once?

Why am I here in the same muddled being?

Why am I not the others?

When i shall be basking in the sunshine

of my true self?

When I will stop stampeding 

like horses through the fog of time?'