Fate

Fate.

In the summer of 1927 when I met Eva
Braun, I was a car mechanic in Hamburg,
and with over-time I had a good wage;

we were going to get married, but during
the October beer festival, she met Adolf,
a budding painter and she left him for me;

but he stopped painting, went into politics;
and in a fit of madness shot her. Had Eva
married me she could have lived to be 104.

the coasline of memories

The coast of Memories

Late summer, it lasted well into September, when I walked along
the pebbled beach in the bay, and saw my uncle and aunt sat on
an air-mattress soaking up the last of the summer light as the sea
gently slapped around their feet. I walked passed them slowly in
the hope they would turn around, see me and give me coins for
ice cream; they didn’t and I was too shy to say halloo.

My aunt looked more or less like my mother, uncle though had
big shoulders and muscular arms, something to tell the boys in
the street, but since he drove the town’s beer truck, I had to invent
a story; he had been a boxer in Chicago, but had to come home
‘cause his mother was sick, if not he would have been the heavy
weight champion of the world now.

Mother says that I mustn’t be alone so much, but I’m here to look
at the shiny pebbles just under the surface of the sea, I used to take them home but they lost their lustre when dry. I also like to listen
to the sea, it sighs mostly as being fed up of being so old and alone; often it whispers stories I repeat when going home. I can’t bring
the boys here they will only be noisy and throw pebbles about.

a quiet smoke

A Quit Smoke

The train stopped at a small station on a bleak plateau,
I stepped on to the terminus to smoke a cigarette which
I deeply inhaled and enjoyed; so intensely I didn’t see
the train leaving. I ran but my feet wouldn’t move,
at the back of the last carriage my doctor stood, “help,
my feet won’t move, I shouted.” “It’s your own fault,
The doctor said, “For eating so much chocolate.”
At the kiosk- inside the station house- I asked the lady,
selling newspaper, if she could help, but she needed
the number of the train and whether I traveled first class
or not. I didn’t know what number train, but said 112,
and yes, first class, thinking that would help. Since I was
dressed, like an Eskimo, from head to toe in sealskin,
and it was seal hunting season in Canada, people gave
me dark looks and when “Guardian” readers folded their
papers into truncheons I fled, got into a car that was just
standing there, drown down the road in the hope of
getting on the train at the next station, but made a wrong
turn and ended up inside a kaleidoscope, where doctors
and people, who like plastic tables, dare not enter.

Birthday Greetings

Birthday Greetings.

He rings me once a year- on my birthday- the old man
I went to school with hundred years ago, after there
had been a long war and our town looked as unpainted
as down town Havana, when no one had cars except
spivs and the police and there weren’t carbon foot print
in the sky; he rings to remind me how old I’m.

Childhood resentment never dies, his mother worked
in a cake shop, mine was putting sardines in tins, so
if I wanted cakes I had to let him win when we played;
now he rings and goes on about our banal illnesses, we
old men have to endure, and when he finally hangs up
I feel depressed and in a need of a drink.

Shore Leave

Shore Leave.


It’s afternoon when we dock at a port that
looks like so many others; there is little time,
our ship will be leaving tomorrow at noon.

There is a dancehall up town, we are told
but our sea legs are not fit for waltzing;
beside, we’re shy and there is little time.

So we go to a place where the beer is cold
and women warm, got to be back onboard
at dawn. Short time, you said? Yes, indeed.

Versifiers and Wine

At the poetry meeting it was decided that all poets were equal
and should wear red plastic noses, of the same size, no longer
should one poet be called great, while another was called minor.
I looked out of the window, the busy world outside was utterly
unaware of this momentous decision. Also poets would now be
able to recognize one another in streets, at the supermarkets and
in cafés, meet and talk about ungrateful Europeans, who don’t
care to know or read about our sagacity.

Coming home workmen had cemented over the garden and were
playing table tennis, I told them to leave but they refused and
began making holes in the cement and planting lemon trees
while accusing me for writing about nature but not understanding it;
“for you,” one of them said looking like a TLS editor, nature is
a nice view on a terrace while enjoying a brawn sandwich and
a cool glass of white wine.” Saddened I walked in to town went
into a bar frequented by unhappy, red nosed poets.

when freedom calls

When Freedom Calls


Tibet today is a modern place, the people no longer
live under the monks’ tyranny, yak butter in the tea
and unwashed poverty. The young are well educated
smartly dressed and Lhasa has nightclubs and cafés’;
so why are they demonstrating against the Chinese?

Because they regard Tibet as occupied by china, their
tongue and culture, which is nation’s soul, under attack;
no, they don’t want the bad old days back, but they do
want their independence back. Occupiers are vampires
that absorbs a nation’s blood and thus, must be slain.

The rejected

The Rejected

I awoke early again and with a sense of unease,
mangled dreams, slamming of doors, contorted
faces, uncontrollable rages, ingratiating voices:
“Come here boy, what sweet a boy you’re”

A Christmas tree thrown out of a window, hoarse
hilarity and the sound of sirens. Fragments of
dreams consigned to the dungeon of rejected
memories, from a time before colours were invented

So why does, a half remembered past haunts me?
I don’t want to look back and fill my heart with
sorrow, from the time I lived with one eyed trolls
and their laughter was shrieks of powerless hate.

The enemy who loved me.

The Enemy Who Loved Me.

I was six years old the enemy soldiers lived in a camp
nearby, they had sweets and I was free to walk
everywhere; yes I cooperated readily, for a bar of
chocolate I was willing to commit treason, I could even
speak few words of their guttural, yet very cultural
language. And then there were those women in a house,
next to the camp, a friendly lot, spoilt me they did when
not busy in locked rooms, teaching, as they said, young
soldiers the art of darning socks. Then peace broke out
and the camp’s gate shut; the women where marched out
of the house, spat on and humiliated for given the foe
comfort. Later in life it struck me as odd that those who
had helped the enemy to built airports and roads, supplied
material and food went on to become the local elite.

The Intinerant

The Itinerant


When I came to the supermarket the guard was outside
telling the begging gypsies by its door to move away, they
did move but not far they sensed his kindness and would
soon be back; a younger guard is needed to get them off
the premises, one who hasn’t suffered any hardship and
is, by nature, a bit dim. There used to be e skeletal woman
amongst them, she’s dead now, a bit of human fluff that
blew in the wind, I suppose she laughed and smiled once,
when a child, but then she had a baby herself when still
a girl, the newborn was taken away and she became distant,
her eyes seeing a future that had nothing to offer. I used to
buy her a fried chicken and chips; she ate it all and was
thankful for that. Perhaps the kind, but ineffective guard
thinks it is good for us to see that poverty is not eradicated.

Senryu

Senryu

If one truth is deep
Is there a hidden one too
Dressed up as a lie?




Senryu

My unborn brother
Stalks me with his absence
And invades my dreams

April Love

April Love


Now that it is spring I remember Lucy Lee
once upon a time, when the old people died,
we promised each other an eternity of love.

Then you had to go to France and in April
Paris is a perilous place, but I had to plough
the soil, sow grain and think of you

When you came back you said merci and oui,
there was a loss of innocence about you;
somehow the love between had gone stale

So I married another woman then, one who
could milk and feed cows, bend her knees
and pull up weed that strangulate carrots.

But it is spring Lucy Lee and I think of you,
and wonder where you are, perhaps you are
A dream because you are forever young.

The good sleep

The Good Sleep


She was late coming home from work, wanted to rest
a bit before dinner, at nine I ate in the kitchen, didn’t
like to wake her yet she was so tired.
I had a drink and watched telly till eleven, then worried,
the silence in the bedroom ominous, what would I do if
she had slipped into the deepest sleep of all?
I knocked softly on the bedroom’s door; “Are you ok
darling?” No answer. I switched on the light came nearer
to the bed, her face was smooth and free of worries,
a smile on her Marilyn Monroe lips, and she was breathing
easily. Relieved I grumpily woke her and asked if she
wasn’t going to eat anything.

The Tax Avoider

The Tax Payer


The old lady, so small she almost disappears in the tall spring
grass, is 104 today. Quick on her feet this early morning she’s
letting the goats out of the barn, in her youth wolves roamed,
now there are people in vans trying to steal a goat or two.
Never married, looked after her parents who lived long, and
the few suitable men around here where of the lazy drinking
types, so there are no children to send her flowers and wish her
well, the goats don’t care as long as she’s there to let them in
at night. Her face has the colour of the brown rich soil around
here, where potatoes grow big and are suitable for baking; her
blue eyes are hazy by age and hold eternities peace; she never
asked for anything and now she has got it all. At a tax office in
The town an inspector looks up from his screen and says: “There
Is a lady in the valley, she 104 today and has never paid any tax.”

epigram

Epigram



Wherever people go they bring cameras
And they don’t see where they have been
Before they are back home, but then they
See it second hand

offspreing of sedition

Offspring of Sedition

In narrow streets between factories that had
never been adorned by paint, as out of grey
walls they came silent children of a different
and darker world.

Don’t speak to them my brother said they are
foreigners and enemies of the country, a by
product of a lost army and treasonous women
who are forever outcasts.

Where the street widened to a square, near
The clear blue, unpolluted sea, there was
sunlight and the unspeakable children slunk
back into damp walls and not seen again.

The Iris

The Iris

In my garden I saw the biggest rainbow ever seen
and it had a shadow too, I bathed in its glare, and
was the original multi coloured raincoat man.
Dug with my bare hands to find the crock of gold,
a big diamond found gave it to my distant brother
for safe keeping, while I dug but found no more.
My brother fled to Rotterdam where he sold my gem
to men with beards and black suites, where it was
cut into pieces, each one worth the price of a statelet.
My brother lives in Swiss, he hate me because I’m
his bad consciences talks bad about me and send me
letters that oozes of bitter resentment. I don’t care
now that I live inside kaleidoscope, and wear a multi
coloured raincoat, I need not precious stones.

Shaving cream

Shaving Cream

On the day that yet another car bomb exploded
in Baghdad, I forgot to buy shaving cream and
had to go back to the shop, there is weariness
about bad news from Iraq. I also forgot to buy
a litre of milk and a goat cheese.

Four thousand US troops killed, which, after
five years of war, as an amazing small number;
but then, this is a war where civilians get to do
the dying .Six hundred thousand or near a million
dead, no one knows or cares, but it might end up
as being as great a crime as the holocaust:

Was it five or six million Jews who perished?
This is a number that concerns deniers greatly,
who are of the opinion that only about 2oo Jews
died, regrettably of typhus, on a train journey
between Poland and Russia.

What we do know, is that the holocaust was
worst criminal act known to man; it is therefore
an eternal shame that Israel uses this tragedy to
silence us when they continue to unlawfully take
more of Palestinian land

It is much easier to take up Tibet’s cause, isn’t
strange that the riots it happens know as
the Olympic in Beijing looms? Forget Iraq and
the Gaza strip, where our hands are bloodied;
this new cause will make us feel morally superior

The roman soldier

The Roman Soldier


It was late evening, when walking along the walls of
the ancient city of Chester, I saw him, the old centurion,
he stood alone dreaming of retirement, the land and
slaves he had been promised when he joined the army.
He and his kind was hated here, in his own beloved land
the almond tree stood in ornate regalia whishing spring
welcome by strewing a carpet of flowers on its path.

He didn’t see the two terrorists sneak up on him, when
he did it was too late, and slowed by age he was knifed
repeatedly. I think they must have sensed my presence,
looking my way they stopped, jumped over the parapet
and vanished. I held the centurion’s hands, he opened
his brown eyes, a brave little smile, and said: “Guess
I shan’t see the flowering of the almond tree this year.”

A magic moment

A Magic Moment


Full moon in the Caribbean Sea, flakes
of silver on black water, and the sea’s
calm heaves is that of a giant’s at sleep.

The ship’s engine heightens silence, that
is only interrupted when someone opens
and slam shut the engine room’s door.

On starboard I see the brilliant light of
a cruise ship, it really is a floating hotel,
I’m glad not to work on a ship like that.

My breath as easy as the giant’s, I think
of nothing and no one; weightless now
I join the seascape of my dreams.