loss of innocence

The Loss of Innocence

At a school sports day I was running 60 metres,

 I wanted so very much to win, could taste blood

didn´t quite make it but got a bronze medal,

 which I wore on my lapel with pride.

When I joined the merchant navy and when going ashore

I wore it too; no one else had a medal like me.

Girls in bars admired it and wanted to know why I had

such a splendid medal. I could not tell the mundane truth

being a compulsive story teller I spun a tale.

Alas, women are destroyers of young men’s pride they want

to possess what they can´t have.

It was in Le Havre I met my downfall, she promised me

heavenly delight for the medal, and I succumbed; the delight

lasted a few minutes and my medal was forever lost.

the seer

The Seer

My mother was a utopian communist

or rather a Marxist, she had only contempt

for the Soviet Union which she called

state capitalism gone mad.

 She believed only communism could

bring about democracy where the people

controlled the means of production.

She predicted the globalization   would bring

wars, workers against workers,

on slave wages. A world where the rich

got more affluent,

 and material success meant everything.

 A world where workers believe in their own failure

and deserve to be poor.

And she was right.

We are ruled by corporations and our freedom

have been curtailed, we are consumers

in a world where even art is commerce valued for

its sales potential and not for its beauty.

they have got him now

They have Got Him Now

War is a great adventure, every boy dreams about it. And writers of lies tell

 stories of sacrifices and great feats of courage.

I have done it again being a place don´t want to be, sit seven floors up on

a terrace and all I can think of is falling into oblivion. it only takes few seconds

 the air stream and the noise and the blessed silence.

The failure of many failures and I´m living tomorrows and can´t remember

the way home, the homes of homes where I was born.

The wrapping papers of gifts not opened how I can face tomorrow.

My cowardice is the only thing left I can trust.

Pre dawn and the echo continues, this is not your world it ended years ago when

you knew you are a ghost of childhood past.

the boredom is absolute. Tomorrows I will remember home and safe among

books that I once wrote I shall be safe and relive what I forgot. And wars will go on

as they always have but I will not play a part of lives’ brutal carousel.

Seven floors up, in my house there are no places to fall. 

pegasus

Pegasus

I saw a big plane coming from Lisbon airport flying high

it was a clear night sky

and I could see a horse flying beside the plane.

Did you see that, the chief pilot

said to the second pilot.

 Yes it  is a Pegasus

it delivers books to people who can´t read.

The pilot called the tower, we are

coming back, it appears something is wrong.

The chief pilot lit a cigarette and

the second pilot objected said it was not legal to smoke

in the cockpit.

The plane landed safely and the horse disappeared.  

When the plane was ready

to fly again the chief pilot was not onboard

he had been reported by the second pilot

for smoking on the job. 

time of forgetfilness

Time of forgetfulness  

He had been to my house often likes to come here, stay for a few days,

 because of the nature where he can walk along overgrown tracks and

see how life used to be lived before. Now he could not find my house and

called me told me the name of the cafe where he had stopped.

 After a meal he went for his walk, but didn´t return and it was getting dark.

we found him under an olive tree he was lost, nothing he knew before

resembled the forest of dread he was in now. It took a while before he knew

me and when he did he cried, the game was up he was slowly succumbing to

Alzheimer. In the morning I drove him back to the town my wife was driving in

his car behind us. He spoke little and when he did mixed the past and present.

When we stopped outside his house he thought I was Dali Lama was flattered

to be in his presence; we arranged for him to go into a home, but before it could

be done he had a lucid moment and cut his life short, as he refused to follow 

the lane of the living death, a ghost that had no memories.

the horror

The Terror

Late afternoon they sat on the bus thinking of a good meal and TV.

A man entered knifed its driver and two passengers. The murderer

dropped his knife in the bus and waited for the police to come,

 the remaining passengers stood outside and waited too, they cried

 and were cold.  The ambulance came first, could do nothing; they

waited also.  Finally the police arrived it took them fifty minutes which

must have felt as an eternity, arrested the man and drove him to jail.

 A deadly calm, a surreal scene, but why had the man kill?

The mass murder Breivik´s crime was temporarily forgotten, killer in

the bus was a foreigner who had lost all reason, had been told that

his appeal to stay in the country had been refused. For this and to avoid

expulsion he had done this. He´d rather stay in jail for the rest of his

life than facing going back to his godforsaken country. This type of

crime, however safe one makes a country horror strikes as lightning.

A river of blood, shed by those who just wanted to go home it leaves

 peaceful people stunned and fumbling for an answer.  

more short verses

Senryu

Brave new world

Reduced to a gossiping village

Spying on neighbours

Senryu

Freedom of speech

Everyone demands a voice

Babbles tower

Senryu

Liberty of discourse

Channelled through facebook

Baby picture