The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being
TWO
POEMS BY PABLO OMAR
1. MOVING AND SHAKING
Sweetie, sit here
and listen up.
Any number of awful things could
happen to anyone of us.
What I usually
do is choose just
one.
Play it out in my head for days
like episodes of a TV series which only
I see.
I write the script.
When it comes to worry, baby,
I'm ambitious.
All I need is a symptom of some
sort and the rest writes itself;
tests, results, tears, hugs...
All I need is
a symptom of some
sort,
an hour unaccounted-for or
misinterpreted words.
Then the ideas start to flow.
I'm ambitious.
I've got the prime-time shows.
There I'll be, not visibly
Trembling, but inside shaking
from side to fearful side.
I'll be captivated
by it.
Consumed.
I'll have no choice but to keep
tuning in.
Any number of
awful things
could happen to anyone of us.
And there are many doing
something similar.
Playing out their worries
and fears in their heads.
Knowledge of it
doesn't help.
But I wonder, do they put as
much effort into it as I do ?
Like I said, I'm
ambitious,
I'm going for the big money.
When the call came
I was in the park
looking at the pond.
The ducks
had gone
to some other part
so it was just water
with yellowed leaves.
There were
breadcrumbs
on the stump of a tree.
It had been days since
I'd spoken to anyone.
Longer still
since Id spoken to him.
I'd get up around
noon.
Drink a couple
of glasses of white wine
then head to the park.
I'd walk a bit,
but for the most part Id
just sit by the pond.
Sometimes
the ducks were there.
Other times they weren't.
I'd write poems.
I was trying to make sense
of what was happening to him
and had happened to her.
All the while something
similar
was happening to me.
I've still
got them.
When they took me
they kept reading them
over and over taking notes.
Irrespective
of all that's
come to pass
the poems are good.
When the call
came I was
by the pond.
On the rail,
between the
bench and the water,
someone had incised What
is a life if full of care ?
We have no time to stop and
stare. I was
looking through
the gap in the rail,
into the pond,
trying to
make sense of it all.
TWO
POEMS BY CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN 1871-1914
translated
from the German by Anthony Weir
MY MEMORIAL
Set up a monument
for me
of sugar, deep down in the sea.
It will dissolve
and thereby make
a vanishing sweet-water lake.
Then fish in hundreds
after hundred
will suck, and be perked up - and scundered;
and they in Petersburg
will then
(and Hamburg) be consumed by men.
My name and fame
would be revitalled
and by sugar thus recycled.
A monument of
wood would rot;
a stone one would just be a spot
for a worthy or
a bird
to deposit scorn or turd.
ON THE PLANET
OF HOUSEFLIES
On the planet
of brilliant houseflies
a human's life is grim,
for what he does here to houseflies
the flies do there unto him
On arsenic-honey
paper
some humans there get firmly stuck,
while others cut macabre capers
by breathing in poisonous muck.
But one little
practice of humans
the flies will not undertake:
they will not bake us in muffins
nor swallow us by mistake.
PROTEST SONG
by
Anthony
Weir
Hey X (Hey Y,
Hey Z...) - Damn you!
You're like something I'd scrape from the sole of my shoe.
You...and your dribbly, knobbly dick...
your idea of 'sex' makes me laugh...and then sick.
You're just another failed masturbator.
You soon fell asleep. I took out my vibrator.
...AND
A HAIKU
Full moon in May
is
still a stained and empty plate
above the starving.
A
poem runs a course of unseen obstacles and comes to some sort
of end with a small insight - not necessarily a great , bogus
clarification, such as religions are founded on - but in a momentary
glimpse of something which seems to be a kind of understanding.
A DIVINE IMAGE
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.
The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.
William Blake
we are all recyclable
The voyage of discovery
is not in finding new landscapes - but in getting new eyes. - Marcel Proust
La terre est couverte de gens qui ne méritent pas qu'on leur
parle. - Voltaire
a free e-Book of 198 of Anthony
Weir's poems (indexed) can be downloaded from PoemHunter
CREDO
yet another reworking of a third-century-BC poem
by Callimachus of Cyrene
Old points of view
expressed anew are crap.
Old sentiments recycled yet again,
banalities of love exposed like wounds in films,
are so much pap.
My writing's much too dissident to win a prize,
my thoughts don't come processed-flaccid from the system.
What majorities desire I just despise.