sky earth soul winter

blue light shows through. the world awakens from slumber. inside dreams the soul was around others once known, but they did not recognize the soul and the soul did not reach out to them. some kind of auditorium. just the filtering and remnants of the far past perhaps. the mind has its own time, and is time. identify the dream but ignore. like when your foot is asleep. it will go away, through time, or be walked and healed. the blue gets lighter. it had snowed all night. the snow had its own beauty and nuance. on eaves. on branches. on rooftops. even on cars. somewhere a solitary fox perhaps walks, looking at the world, the grounds, fluffy tailed and red. there was a field immense and if the soul glanced at it, well just sometimes there would be a coyote near the middle standing.

and if the soul stared long the coyote would notice and look back. but this had not happened in a long time. the field seemed to be without anything but the snow reeds here and there and the lines like small narrow swaths some farmer must have made with a tractor in the brighter warmer days. the soul still imagined that the coyote was somewhere, and took refuge in the thought. why? because the world around there was so hum-drum-glum,- mediocre, full of sameness. sometimes a hawk watched the fields though. the blue that turned light blue had become almost a white firmament. to be a poet is to be invisible for better or worse, mused the soul passively. to be a poet is akin to being a ghost. ‘You are like a ghost,’ someone had said. but it wasn’t positive or pejorative, it had just been a statement. a stationary tractor sat forever by a field. in the late spring or summer the tractors moved again, like bees come to life buzzing and when they did, it could be incessantly. make way air. make way field. make way. there was a place on the outskirts of towns not overtaken by progress. once the soul knew the people there. they liked the soul but the soul was solitary and aloof from birth and this must have been written in a natal chart. somewhere. in the Akashic. not on anything in life as the time was unrecorded, unknown. and the birth time was needed for a proper chart. journey. the dawn. the snow. the times. the opacity of the upwards air. ah well. good enough. step and step. one day spring would see fit to show itself again.

Telepath

i

What would you choose if a look could kill,

turn the tide or save the day.

Reverse fortunes on the head of a sixpence.

Turn your only godchild to stone

(that she might have a change of heart) 

or do you stare helplessly

into the abyss – immobilized by your sense

of historical inevitability.

ii

Frau Demuth already sees what will become

of Marx’s first biographer

on the day she announces her engagement

to Doctor Aveling (since loneliness

can’t be cured by a kiss)

but for all her knowing looks, she can only study

the waltz of shades unraveling

during Sunday dinner at Regent’s Park.

Second sight – powerless to stop time,

despite the ‘sure thing’

of a spectre haunting Europe

or the shabby ghost of a third Jewish messiah

whose ideas would one day divide the world.

iii

Any wonder why Eleanor Marx fell

through the looking glass. Crashing from nervosa

to love. Love to nervosa. And nervosa

back to love again.

Impossible, in all the after dinner conversation,

to tell which from which.

Only that the phrase: ‘this looks familiar,’

goes unheard by those whom we would save

from themselves,

if only they would hear us.

Cosmic Cradle

i

What shall we do with our nameless child – 

so much a part of us? So much more, than loss of hope

for Karl and Jenny, or the burial record

of an invisible girl? She who holds both dissonance

and harmony (rose and wreath

in her tiny hands) as we lay her to rest

under indifferent skies, but no one knows why  

a dying girl’s face tilts

towards the moon.

ii

Last night, the girl we already grieve

as a lost galaxy – crawled from her crib to sing

as a star – spreading her wings

in exquisite poverty. Here at the world’s edge,

her breath leaves semitones of light

on the latticed glass.

Here, nothing is more important

than music and moonlight.

Shining Light

We have learned your name by heart,

Helene Lenchen Demuth.

And we can tell you that Demuth,

from the Middle High German, ‘diemuot,’

or ‘demuot,’ is a nickname

given for a humble or modest person.

How do we know, only because

there’s no equivalence for ‘Lenchen’

in the Indo-European vernacular,

but ‘L’ is always for love,

which you give to all you encounter.

‘E’ is for equal footing, because you meet

us all on a level playing field.

‘N’ is for necessity, because the realm

of needs, can never be breached

by the leap to freedom alone.

‘C’ is for change, because you adapt

to both ebb and flow. ‘H’ is for heart,

because you always make a home  

out of hope. ‘E’ is for endure,

because we can never forget you.

‘N’ is for nodal point, because going on

is the only option to not going back.

Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 No. 4

for Nora

What is this sadness that invites us

to withdraw into the magic

of minor keys. Are we the astronomers

of descending melodies, discovering

the faintest of stars. Is this what loneliness

sounds like. Chord chains torn

from another dimension. As if the heart,

(cleaved from the body) still grieves alone

in a Warsaw crypt. Tomorrow we smile

again, for tonight we live

our saddest dreams.

Diamonds and Water.

The book of your life is hardly written

yet you look at the world

with all the curiosity life affords.

And though you sit and watch in silence,

you reject the impasse

of a world that defies kindness.

Understanding the secret

ballot that ties the big stick to diplomacy,

or as democracy’s diary

would have it: ‘All for ourselves

and nothing for other people.’ A maxim

so deeply rooted, so definite  

in the division of worlds, it chaperones,

protects and champions

portfolio investment in art, repo-markets

and perfect competition in a face off

with the tasteless tyranny

of the ‘herd.’

You know it’s not your job to think,

only to follow orders,.

yet you have devoted your heart

to the struggle to shape your own ideas,

in your transformation

from wide-eyed peasant girl 

to radical, confidante, and public enemy 

with Soho’s most dangerous

philosopher. A dissident Jewish doctor,

forced to pawn

his only suit of clothes

to buy a coffin for his unnamed daughter – 

unwrapping the ultimate paradox

of value.

Thistle in Humble Soil

Perhaps your closed crown defies the wind

in a field where shadows bully

the faithless, but we live

here where faith is currency

to silence the Aspen’s wild pulse.

Where is the ‘doing’ word that gives us

the upper hand? We speak

while we still have use of our tongues.

In less than a heartbeat

your spiny leaves will yield

their armor under the heavy boots

of Caledonian foresters,

but your magenta crowned florets will prevail

in the field’s heart as if poised to mend

the world. You who thrive

in the barest of ground, rise up again

in winter’s drifts. Testament how we live

to fight another day.

Helene Demuth Notes A Change of Heart

Q. How do you turn down a dialectical thinker

with a hard on for a new idea?

A. Tell him the dialectics of hope turn out to be

nothing more than the interpenetration

of id and ego. You can’t always hold back

the tide, but you can always muddy the waters

by taking refuge in the greatest good

for the greatest number. One death is heroic.

Two deaths, a tragedy. Better to be dissatisfied

as Socrates, than satisfied as a pig.

A qualitative leap between, ‘I have begun

to long for you.’

And, ‘I who have no need.’

Venturing Beyond

You are not a peasant girl from Sankt Wendel,

Housekeeper or fellow traveller.

You are not your age, or even ageless.

You are all the people you touch

when other people find them untouchable.

All the smiles you bring to others

when smiling is felt subordinate to living.

You are the promises on both sides

of assonance and dissonance.

You are the discontent which belongs to hope.

You are the tears of Niobe when pride takes a fall.

You are the verity of pride

when pride surrenders to pity.

You are all children that are never lost

because you are reborn in the image of children

(the Not-Yet-Conscious and Not-Yet-Become)

on the horizon of all being.

You are the one who changes

into what they really are, what they can really be.

The forward dreamer, who is yet to break

through into words.

Van Gogh’s Irises

Even in La Villle d’Amour, the state of emergency

is not the exception but the rule.

Think of the continuous flow of empty time

and the tiger’s leap into the thickets of long ago.

Think of two hundred canon on the brow

of Montmartre. Of the sixty-four days redeeming

the past in service of the present.

Think of blue irises at the Wall of Love

and the words ‘I love you,’ on three hundred tongues.

Think of purple irises uniting springtime love

with the Communard’s Wall.

Think of the history of civilisation

written in blood. Then think of the future as a flower

turning towards the sun – rising in the sky

of a history – yet to be written.

Angelus Novus

Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

All art is metaphor. Even when it evokes the union

between progress and catastrophe

Time in need of salvation, an ancestor

in need of awakening, or an angel thwarted

by war and civil war. A storm cloud 

blown in from paradise –

trapped between future past and future present.

Suspended in the struggle of empty-time.

Staring towards the horizon, saying something

profound. Awaiting an answer, beyond

the artifice of perception, as she turns her thoughts

away from internal flight.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

Here! Here! Let’s hear the rest! Light at the end

of the tunnel – the only extraction now

from time in a cage.

What is the Name of this Poem?

i

Your social aims may be fashionable

and indeed, admirable, but no amount of political cheer leading

can prepare you for the darkness

of the lived moment. If semiology is a negation –  

no amount of words can expurgate, refine

or reform the shit shovel. What is

‘ghost forest’ for you is only a private metaphor

for desertification.

An exile from the ancient city of Aleppo,

might well be ‘displaced,’ but any politically correct verbiage

belies the human dimension of losing one’s home,

one’s family and being compelled

to live in a skip or public toilet like an alley cat.

A rebel from Mount Simeon, might well be a ‘job seeker’

to you, but any attempt to dress ‘stateless nationals’

as anything other than ‘stake holders’

will be met with derision from the floor. Since a reserve army

of unemployed is always good for business.

ii

If thought itself can be called a negation:

what of unsustainability and over-production?

Since no concept can articulate the whole relationship

vis-a-vis man and Nature – the semiotics

of exhuming the dead or saving the planet to secure a home – 

will be met by an irresistible canon ball

fired at an immovable post. Positing truth itself

is negative – insofar as it presupposes

something else is not true.

Shamanic Dance Sublation

for Douglas Colston & Dylan Murphy

i

O’ pliable experts in humanity. You who proclaim

the end of history. You who mop the brow

of Nero (bless the mob as you talk our dreams to sleep)

hold a noose over the past, as if to cut a deal

with the future. You who watch Rome burning 

while the tyrant fiddles, if only to observe

the facts. You who say nothing of master and slave,

lost peoples, stolen lands.  Mouthing

those heroic last words: ‘What an artist dies in me,’

as if to turn language and art into consumables – buy up

the last innocence of thought. You who procure

freedom like a bestiarii in that chamber of horrors

we call the Circus – for the age-old celebration

of ‘business as usual.’  In the prison of apprehension

we can hardly move, let alone breathe freely,

but history doesn’t end in triumphalism for one class

or nation over its rivals. It is open to the future 

precisely because we’re surrounded by possibility.

Because agency suggests the content

of the future – because the ‘mystical fire’ of the soul 

lives forever in the recall of night eyes. 

In the constellations of Orion and Cassiopeia.

Where we dream and we remember: 

Nature and human nature are opposite sides 

of the same nature because we still live in a prehistory 

that only stands because we are yet to grasp

who we are. What we might be without constructs

and aggregates – the esoteric architecture

of studio, stadia, steeple, church. The appropriation 

of man by man. Division and progress. Progress

and division.

ii

To know a thing is to know its end but the quest

for knowledge is not conquest of the unknown 

but a journey through the unknowable.

Being moves through time  – from the Servile Wars

of Spartacus to the Peasant Revolt,

from the beheading of a Cavalier King to the shootings

of the Tsar and Tsarina .But time only remains

as a function of being. The real antagonism for the cat

in the box is living. In the boardrooms of Titanic,

progress implicates itself as problem

and solution, but the solution remains the problem.

If we are to translate the world as we change it,

we must learn how observation weasels out

of objectivity. In the bordellos of objectivism,

we must renegotiate the objections to knowledge

over function. Where science serves myth

and myth maker, (which only paves the way

for more whoring) the self-encounter is not quantitive 

or absolute, but rebellious because it puts no price

on sovereignty. S is not yet P,

but when we change subject and predicate,

we change how we see the world. Age and death

can do no more to define us because the ‘Now’ 

is our time.  The locus of Winstanley’s diggers 

(which is Not Yet articulated)

is beginning to carve the skyline of the future

from the vanishing point of the past into the horizon

of the present. The sky in Heraclitus reminds us

how flow and flaw reveal the path ahead.

We find ourselves in the places where we were most lost.

iii

We find ourselves in the Shamanic dance

of ancestors, in the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee – 

in moments torn from time, because being

and time are tied to a tug of war in the infinite

possibilities of the finite. True genesis (the creation

of man by man) does not call for gods.

It is not at the starting gate but the finish line 

because freedom is not the fabled flower of immortality

but the action of picking the wild flower

from the chain – the present moment fulfilled 

in the rupturing of empty time.

In the leap between the rebel dead and the Novum. 

Fearing the past only petrifies the past

until slave and rebellion are redeemed in the present,

because the past is only a rebellion 

for memory until it is re-enacted in the world.

Rebellion not only pervades the past – it proposes

the future. Reminds us of the light

at the mouth of the cave, because the sun

(which is yesterday’s memory) ascends in the daydream

of childhood. In the homeland of all living beings

where man is yet to belong. As the slave army turns

to the sun, so the past turns to us 

before it threatens to disappear – because healing begins

in the rebellion  of the fragmented mind 

and we are the creators

of miracles. 

————————————————————————–

boring is good

all the madness has

been drained from

my desire

it is all simply day

after day

same old shit after all

the other boring shit

it was explained to

me as a child, this

was life

that boring is good

and i’m stuck here

wondering if i am

even alive

but the sun will

come up again

the birds will shit

on your driveway

the stray cat will

piss on your porch

flowers and weeds

good thing i wasn’t

using that hour

just a little crack

in the misery

happiness always

gave me the creeps

———————————————————-

a touch of genocide

and here come the clowns

angelic devils sent to torture

young children

imagine all your birthdays

had just a touch of genocide

that yellow brick road

has been covered in

blood

just an endless war

to feed the rich

trapped in suburbia

knowing all of this

is futile

she gave me a handful

of dead flowers and said

like everything else, they

were once beautiful

all we have is nostalgia

you know,

when eggs were priced

less than a body part

porch cigarettes

and a bottle of jack

must be spring

———————————————–

murder mystery

a valley of sadness

a b movie on a saturday

night in the sticks

murder mystery

with a tv dinner

they still sell

salisbury steak

at the local deli

a red x through

all the days

calendar after precious

little puppy calendar

you like cats better

because all assholes

stick together

another empty

for the floor

death is in the air

crushing pills so the

alcohol still shines

wake up two weeks

later in the hospital

forgotten your name

but don’t worry, they

always know who will

be paying the fucking

bill

—————————————————–

in this vapid wasteland

sometimes it isn’t

even the pain

being tossed to

the side of the

road

wasting time trying

to find love in this

vapid wasteland of

unmarked graves

and declining

statistics

dead skin

sleeping on the floor

waiting for death like

a whore on christmas

one last glass of scotch

and some blues on the

radio

the shotgun in the corner

may get some action tonight

more than i can say about

the rest of us

—————————————————————————

the beauty of a few drinks in

her neon eyes caught

my attention from

across the room

all those curves in

all the right places

yet another one

way out of my

league

but the beauty of a

few drinks in is there

is no limits in a drunken

mind

first rule,

always make her laugh

i’m not sure about the

second rule as i never

had much success with

rule one

i bought her a drink

asked her name

and told her she

was beautiful

she said you can do

better than that

i laughed and explained

to her about disappointment

and sometimes you should

just enjoy the compliment

and free booze

the younger ones never

got those lessons about

honesty

J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is trapped in suburbia, plotting his escape. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Dope Fiend Daily, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Beatnik Cowboy and Disturb the Universe Magazine. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

Woman,

You are alive

A mother

A daughter

Womens,

We respect eachother

We support eachother

Our power is strong

When we are together

Woman,

A friend

That we never leave you at your hard time

Woman,

The creativity

The poetry

The art 

Woman we must celebrate and be respected everyday 

Eva Petropoulou Lianou 

Official candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024

International poet

As kind as a mother, as dear as a father,  

There is a being who is cherished like a friend.  

Carrying my burdens on their shoulders,  

Holding my hands, helping me overcome hurdles.

Introducing the good and the bad,  

Enlightening the heart with the light of knowledge.  

Awakening beautiful virtues in the heart,  

Completely forgetting their own comfort.

NATION, MOTHER, FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and AFFECTION,  

Demonstrating their essence like a guiding flame,  

Burning for someone’s destiny,  

Spending sleepless nights in their thoughts.

Yet there’s no debt for all this love!  

Only a bright future is my only reward.  

If my heart is a mountain, should I succeed,  

It will embrace me, saying, “My child!”

If I achieve my goals,  

All my efforts are merely a drop in the ocean.  

If I weigh both of us on the scale,  

THIS HUMAN is the ocean, and I am simply a drop.

Life flows like a rushing river,  

Constantly adding youth with every passing moment.  

But I will not erase this person from my heart,  

The loving TEACHER who introduced me to the world.

Musurmonova Gulshoda Olimjon qizi was born on March 9, 1997, in Jizzakh district of Jizzakh region. After completing secondary school, she attended an academic lyceum and then continued her education at Jizzakh State Pedagogical Institute in the Faculty of Primary Education.

During those years, her interest in writing poetry began to develop. Currently, she is teaching primary classes at school number 42 under the system of MMTB in Sharof Rashidov district of Jizzakh region.

Gulshoda is married, and her poetry predominantly covers themes such as Parents, Homeland, Love, Consequences, and Life. She deeply expresses human feelings and promotes enlightenment in her works.

THE BOMBED GENERATION

Bivouacking among nameless bards, sounding boards transfixed by twinges of toothache,

i summon monsters masked by pain and anguish under bombardment

skilful tightrope walkers on the strings of enchantment, or disenchantment,

intermittent comet stars.

Shunning wishes of the Maurizio Costanzo Show,

like eighties vates, we take to the streets to sing,

and to endure charges like animals in battery,

never surrendering to the scheming

created by statesmen alien to all embarrassment.

OUT OF ISCHEMS

Try, once in your life, to stop living outside each ischeme,

without constant ink interruptions to the vein’s phoneme,

so that the western crisis becomes an occipital crisis,

with the saving of ants increase the consumption of cicadas.

As you stopped reading, at least stop writing

‘public’ that doesn’t exist and forces us to sell books like vacuum cleaners,

Porta a Porta, where Novi Aldi goes on Vespa and returns Bompiani,

after abandoning Theseus’ ship, in whiff of hurricanes.

This is the century, or the millennium, of the professional artist

not knowing how to do anything, you are content to remain a figurehead,

among the various shrewd actors and actresses of the publishing market

willing to give their children to a rom in exchange for an inch of shelf space

in the prestigious Feltrinelli bookshop in your town

you don’t want to stop living out of ischems, c’aggia fa?

I DON’T CARE

For the last twenty years or so, ‘I don’t care’ has been back in fashion,

herds of brainless constipated people, all, in search of the rehabilitierung of ego,

brick by brick, in the black shirt of ignorance organising raids,

with the outcome of ending up dead, a mosquito bite away, on couch Freud’s.

The new mass, without any strength, waiting for an acceleration,

placed under scrutiny receives its models from television magazines,

moved by a self-esteem disproportionate to its actual neural entity,

ite, missa est, giving extreme unction, being a cancerous mass.

Talking to the average italian is like talking to Louis XVI,

an anencephaly patient who dreams of residing in the Medici court,

living in Masters of Florence, the Renaissance soap opera,

forcing you to surrender to the Magone as Lucius Chinchus Alimentus.

With the new ‘I don’t care’ generations we should build democracy,

stuff of exterminating homo sapiens sapiens with an attack of epizootics,

we will rely on a detailed deliberative referendum of protest,

forcing our fellow-citizens to use their heads.

ASSAULT ON THE OVENS

Panem et circensens is asked of the contemporary artist,

playing the clown at readings grants 15 minutes of impromptu success,

they read kilometres of verse, written in half an hour, with a shrewd attitude,

they would also declaim verses in arabic if Isis established a Caliphate in Palermo.

They read, read, read, all the flour of their infinite sack

and we, with our gags on, to be subjected to their dribbling to end up in checkmate,

the queen, bored, is undecided whether to fuck the king or a horse,

and the contemporary reads, reads, without allowing us an interval,

without allowing himself an interval, between one bullshit and another, without ever being satisfied

he has to bring home the bread-roll, hey, as an artist who boasts of being overpaid.

THE BARBARIAN AND THE PRINCESS

To you who observe with your bistro eyes my discontents

you defuse me with a smile, you neutralise me with a love

as enduring as a Compact Fluorescent Lamp,

becoming aeriform, neon, argon, krypton,

maybe it’s the krypton that deactivates my Superman cravings,

climbing up my spine with catlike paws,

dissuading me from gobbling, from drinking, from brawling, from stopping writing.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

i keep wearing white tank tops in my black underwear

not washing the dishes, banging on the keys,

better than washing the keys and banging on the dishes,

i kidnapped you on a raid on the coasts of Gaeta,

enchanted by you, late-modern Circe,

capable of turning pigs into men,

pig’s heart is equal to the human heart,

you alone have understood this, in twenty years, with your insulinous carefreeness,

with your insecurities, with your premenstrual breakdowns, with your questioning face,

always capable of disconcerting me, square mime destined to go bald,

without replacing me.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

yet without being able to dedicate Odi barbare to you,

i am not equipped to hate anyone, or to mix metres,

– what shall we do, half a metre?- better my aptitude for duelling,

Ro rocamboling, half Cyrano de Bergerac and half Socrates,

i’m convinced that you prefer me whole, and long-life,

not having the ambition of the modern woman

to turn her man into an asshole.

AT THE TAVERN OF SOLID LOVE

My little love, solid, you, today, fell

and i was not there to support you, with my aggressive biceps

of a barbarian from the northern forests, my face painted blue,

lying in the spasmodic berserksgangr of drinking from the skulls of the vanquished,

it all begins with a trembling, chattering of teeth and a feeling of cold,

immense rage and a desire to assault the enemy.

My little love, fragile, you, today, fell,

and there is a tavern behind our house, all brianzola, your new world,

there is a tavern that serves a hundred and a hundred types of risotto

to spread on your wounds and on your skinned knees,

where i, imperative man, can still interpret every amber darkness

in your wise child’s eyes, manipulating the kaleidoscope of your irises,

voluntarily uncovering my flank to the dagger of your arctic lucidity.

If not a tavern, our love, resembles us: we eat and live,

remunerating each other, victories and defeats, hôtellerie, we bustle and eat,

until the innkeeper Godan, the god of stubborn ‘poets’, slams a mug of mead on the table

invite us to dance at Walhalla, Mocambo a contrario, dance far away, to the end of the worlds,

you will return to the simple freshness of your sea, you wandering caetan siren of sand,

and to me the fog-damp earth of the valley without ascents or descents will not weigh on my zinc.

In the ancient taverns of solid love continue to mix fog and sea-water,

outside thunderstorms, lightning and thunder, liquefied by the cloudburst everything is drying out,  

and we, we eat and live, we bustle and eat, sheltered, in our reserve of happiness,

aware that, hovering in the air, in the long run,

the misty ice crystals will flow into the sea.

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni and Kolektivne NSEAE with Divinafollia. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L’Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and is included several times in the major international literature magazine, Gradiva. His verses are translated into 25 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology) [https://kolektivnenseae.wordpress.com/].

Seeing Four Times

 1-

Hopper boarding house:

lights on behind each

window, a story in every room.

 2-

Hands framed like O’Keeffe’s

in black and white. Age spotted

and arthritic now. Two handled

coffee cup nearby, steaming.

 3-

Burchfield snowscapes surreal

as sun behind snow burdened

trees. All the walls inside

papered with dreams.

 4-

O’Keeffe’s night sky.

clouds over the desert.

Windows open to let

the stars in.

Seeing Five Times

 1-

Loud noise startles-

crows rise from

Van Gogh’s fields.

 2-

After the shipwreck-

Turner recreates

the storm.

 3-

Light clarified-

Monet’s out of focus

flowers.

 4-

Shadows brushed by light

at sunrise-new eyes

are needed.

 5-

Inside the cathedral:

sunlight through stained

glass. Hopkins’ pied beauty.

Seeing Six Times

 1-

Windblown sun against

window glass, a study

for a landscape.

 2-

An arrangement of summer

squash on a picnic table

by size and height;

almost art.

 3-

Rock formations where

mountains abruptly end.

Rising mist envelopes

lost climbers. Nowhere to go.

 4-

Felled trees carved

Into animal heads.

A man with a chainsaw.

Making art.

 5-

Dawn in the mountains.

Fog layers a lake.

Last night’s rain still

on trees.

 6-

Landscape with sunset.

low slate gray clouds

underscored by dayglo

red on the hills, windows

reflect bits of color.

Seeing Seven Times

 1-(Durant)

Last flourish of sun

over white mountains.

Shadows cloud still

water. Nothing moves.

Not even the light.

 2-(Hokusai)

Snowcapped Mt. Fuji.

Red sun sinks.

The sea on fire.

 3-(Cropsey)

Fading clouds last

reflective glow on still

water, sun tainted evening

mists drift towards shore.

4-(Hokusai)

Draws perfect circles,

one inside the other.

Then the Great Wave.

 5-(Church)

Low ridge of black

clouds. The whiteness

of a snow peak. A full

moon rising.

 6-(Hokusai)

Musing. Travelers hike

curving paths bearing

burdens on their backs,

where one trail ends,

another begins.

 7-(Self-Portrait)

Deeply furrowed flesh.

Collapsing facial lines.

Tired eyes still laughing.

The White and the Blue and the Black Three Times

 1-

The sky bleeds 

where sun meets

the sea

The slow tide

of night that

follows after

 2-

Lilacs in full bloom.

The white and the blue.

A purple Iris border;

Spring’s tone poem

 3-

Before the storm:

dead calm of still

black night

The island drawing

lightning from the sky

Wind chimes sound

the alarm

Les Preludes: Ted and Sylvia, One Each

 1-

Fluctuating sea breezes,

sky changing from

blue to gray to black;

hawk in the rain

 2-

Dead fall amid winter

trees; matted grass where

the deer lie down