Category: poetry

I tolerate DEVIANTS because I have to.
I don’t like and don’t respect because I can.

a statement found on a social network

poetry written by life
has the best punch lines.
like this furious tirade
on perverts under the text
of someone who wrote
that he is proud to be homo
sapiens.

i have seen people kill themselves
without dying, some elderly, some
simply old and all just tired. each
of them a fugitive from an unsaid
abbey. each with their own sense
of briefness inscribed upon them.
not one old enough to finally order
a pint of lager.

regretting leaving my hermitage
for collegium maius, i do not curse
you but the drowsiness of the lecture
hall and our confused impressions.
after all, who could have foreseen
that my desires would crash against
your aversions, or that your great lust
for adventure would collide with my
austerity in life. the naivety of a young
faith in idealized feeling rarely obeys
common sense.

For death is nothing but the origin of life,
as life is the compensation of death.

A. C. Grayling, The Good Book

the winter of my birth
gave me my first breath
of cold air and nature
at rest. i often fell asleep
to the croaking of rooks,
and the touch of white
marked me with a love
of simplicity. i was my
own, still unwritten
fulfilment.

the winter of my death
will most likely drown
in the rain and the crying
of seagulls. but although
i like the grey of granite,
please cover my naked
silence in a jute cloth
and bury it in a barren
field with a seedling
of the tree of life.

born from one womb,
i have as many mothers
as memories. countless
children and ex-wives,
past and future, fill
the myriads of lives
gathered in a single i
that i write in stanzas,
so that you can get
to know my reality
of fiction.

i can understand the feelings
of flat earthers. it is a matter
of sense of justice. because
is it fair that when i have to
sweat my brow, someone else,
somewhere in the so-called
antipodes, sleeps soundly?
and on the other hand, when
my life slips away while i am
asleep, on that other side
of the globe some lucky sod
delights in the charms of his
own life. so on my flat earth,
the world finally really revolves
around me.

my first unforgettable experience
as an emigrant was bewilderment
at the sight of churches turned into
pubs and nightclubs. not that i am
religious or anything, on the contrary,
i am an atheist and i understand
the islanders’ sense of practicality,
but my upbringing in a catholic
country made me feel a little fond
of such places, especially this eerie
silence of their void.

my mother once told me
that she had some distant
jewish ancestors, but that
little addition to the cocktail
that flows through my veins
hardly makes me a jew.
funnily enough, a feature
of my anatomy makes me
look like one and it did
not even require a mohel,
i was born that way.

my father once told me
that his father’s ancestors
came from the nobility
and his mother came from
an even more noble family.
it is puzzling, though, that all
this blue blood did not prevent
the proud men from drinking
their lives away and i nearly
ended up the same way,
a true son of my father.

and i once told myself
that i would never be
a faceless one in the crowd,
but only true to himself
individualist. it is hard
to suspect a ten-year-old
of contempt for people,
so it must have been
my naiveté stimulated
by the books in which
i escaped from my identity.

one might ask why am i
revealing these details?
the point is, i do not know
who i am.

when i think about the reasons for being funny
at three in the morning, i know that i will regret it
if only for the lack of sleep because it is the middle
of the week and i have to go to work in three hours.
but a glass of water and a piece of flatbread will do
wonders. so i chew my heavily premature breakfast
and wonder why am i not being funny any more
and when did it happen? i should have asked this before
she left.