41 He turns Forty-one In Sri Lanka And sees harmony Amidst the chaos, He sees things Make sense In a way that They never Have before.
Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Invictus,” his debut poetry collection, is due out in January 2024.
LOVE IS MY WEAPON My meaning of existence is happiness I give people only justice because love is too special for me in almond-colored eyes I know that I am a very special person because my love is very constant and the meaning of my existence is hope that I will never be alone My hope is the meaning of existence I want to give you love now because my love has limits when I set perm only msebi Love is my weapon the meaning of my existence and part of my reason for existence when the world stops i have you Maid Corbic from Tuzla, 23 years old. In his spare time he writes poetry that is repeatedly praised as well as rewarded. He also selflessly helps others around him, and he is moderator of the World Literature Forum WLFPH (World Literature Forum Peace and Humanity) for humanity and peace in the world. He is world 44. poet in the world and five in the Balkan. He has over the 10.000 followers on Facebook.
***
Wintering
Birds of flame in the eyes
Оf the one who looks at the flame
Close your ears don’t breathe
The same old
Еver-familiar musical libretto
Іnside the memory
Оf the heart
Will be heard by the carpenter
Рreparing a new coffin for my love
***
I talk to the tree but it is silent
I talk to a stone and it wets
I talk to water and it just flows
I scream at the water
I’m screaming at the childhood that doesn’t exist
I scream for war
Hundreds of nuclear bombs explode inside of me
My molecules spill out of a hole in the body
And suddenly I fall silent to become a stalactite
Millennium stalactite
Strong adult silent stalactite
***
my father carves crafts out of my skin
nature plays tag with foliage
my spring is ending
***
cat paws kill mice
blood is splattered all over the kitchen
cat hugging my leg
the kitchen presses against me with the aroma of food
***
wipe my face with the wind
wash my body clean
autumn – human autumn – human
***
The color of the blind and the color of the colorblind
A bird tells a bird about flight
The voice of the silence of the living and the dead
Yellowness of book pages and freshness of rye
The cell of the body and the cell of physicality
The color of death and the twilight of essence
Flight of imagination and imagination of flight
A bird looks for the sky in the sight of a blind man
A color-blind person is bathed in colors
Two people in line in an optician
And over their heads is a joint and separate God
***
No one was born human
No one died as a god
The rain washes away the fear from your face
The courage to be afraid when a stranger with the face of death roars through the windows with artillery explosions
***
Death is the cover
My body starts making friends with worms
The worms are fucking me in all the cracks just as they were during my life
Only now no one pays me for fucking because the bills are paid in full
***
The loneliness of antiquity befell the cemetery
Butterflies played a symphony of heritage with their wings:
They were once in a cocoon
They once cocooned themselves
They were once their own parents
Flowers tickle themselves with playful wings
How much is the life of a butterfly if thanks to a butterfly spring comes and the cemetery lives again?
(The Wise Owl reprint)
***
roads explode right under your feet
war is a house without wallpaper
the skies explode overhead
the plane’s gut becomes the first victim
the ability to be honestly afraid appears when a stranger with the face of death breathes into the crown of the head
***
the witch was burned on such a huge log
that if a crossbar were added
it would be a cross
a time for crusades and disbelief is ahead
my cat is purring
and with my eyes closed I conjure
an end to the war outside the window
the cat smiles knowing that wizards do not exist
the future has arrived
it is spring
the graves remain
(3rd Wednesday reprint)
***
we drink the silence of the water breaking the reflection of the cherry blossoms
we quench our thirst with cherry blossoms disturbing the water in which it is reflected
we also reflected in the water
we are reflected in each other
we kiss like grains of sand
we fall apart like sand kisses
at least that’s what I imagined in my head
the water in the morning will wash away our paired traces that never existed
*
balancing between
war and war
leads to groin strain
outside the broken
window you can hear
the songs of birds
as if no one had died
*
the bird drowned itself in silence
our night cries fall on the cemetery slabs
along with the autumn leaves
*
boy washes in the rain
near the ruins of a house
the night takes slain soldiers
into its womb
*
the sky is turning blue
the water turns white
transparency disappears
and in childhood everything seemed clean and clear
in childhood everything seemed black and white
as a child I did not believe that it was possible to become an adult
I still can’t sleep sometimes
and monsters crawl out from under the bed
torturing me on a full moon
just don’t call mom for help anymore
(An edited new version published in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters)
Essay:
“My cat vomits grass”
What does my cat do all day long? Continuously washes himself after I hug him. However, before that he comes and rubs himself against me. Even at five in the morning and with dirty paws, when I sleep he rubs his face, because the rest of his body is hidden by the blanket.
Often the cat eats: food from the bowl, bugs, grass. Sometimes he vomits on the walkway. The walkway is already stained with cat hair and vomit, too. I don’t blame my cat: I myself have vomited a couple of times in the last year from what’s going on around me.
Often a cat will hunt mice, then toss and chew on the corpse, and leave the mouse remains and guts by the side of the road. Animal instincts are incomprehensible to me: why kill and chew on mice if you’re already well fed?
Sometimes the cat plays with household items, from shoelaces to flowers on window sills.
Despite the fact that my cat is a filthy rotter – I love him. He came to our house after the war began and came to live with us. The cat doesn’t understand at all what’s going on around him, and I don’t explain anything to him: what if he starts protecting our house from the blast wave and dies?
It’s funny, I still haven’t figured out the gender of my cat, but by default I think he’s a boy.
Someday my cat will die without ever knowing that a war has broken out. What’s more, my cat will never know why the war started. I will probably die, too, without ever finding out why people go to war. I want to die without finding out that there is a war.
Reprint by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
I BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION
Yesterday I dreamed that I was the King Witiza’s son
That with his brothers and Count Julian
Contributed to the invasion of Spain
By the Arabs, and its subsequent conquest
Dismembering, murdering and raping
Left and right everywhere
Reincarnating me, later, in Cayo Oppio
One of Caesar’s lieutenants
That he wiped his ass with the leaves
From his illustrious works titled
“War of Alexandria”, “War of Africa”
And “Spanish War”
That Caesar did the same while shitting
Although this one liked to clean himself more
With the index and middle fingers
From the left hand
To then write on the walls
With the right hand
Fed his hand with the left
An exquisite “Ave Cesar”.
Then a deliberating body appeared to me
A Cherub or angel with the head of a donkey
Which came from Thartac
God of the Hivites
That he told me that he came
From the Donkeys ‘Temple
That he was the brother of a galleon general
From King Felipe II or Fernando VII
Figures in ignominy, affront
The disgrace and vilification.
As are serial killers
That swarm between Israel and Palestine
Between Russia and Ukraine
Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sudan
Yemen, Myanmar, Nigeria and Syria
Even Mexico drug cartel
With its only idea of subduing the oppressed
With harshness and violence
Harassing, bothering, killing, tyrannizing
In the style of those who have been reincarnated
True beasts of crime
Kaffirs and cannibals who enter
In the dignity and fame to which they are entitled
And that the populace enchants:
The evangelizers who preached
Christian doctrine
To infidels or pagans
Killing, raping, murdering.
Serial killers: Francisco Macías Nguema
Saparmurat Niyazov, François Duvalier
Rafael Trujillo, Enver Hoxha
Mobutu, Ted Bundy.
The most recent: Hitler, Musolini, Franco
Like those of now: Netanyahu and Hamas
In metempsychosis or transmigration
Of the souls of some in those of others
Souls with metastrongyl
Parasite of the lungs of the pig.
In the end, without almost waking up
I turned into steam
Evaporative fart
That dissipated, vanished all the dream.
-Daniel de Culla
The Broken Bell and The Death of Goodness
The lady asks the man serving the food why the container is only half full. He looks at her annoyed and remarks, ‘I do my best,’ and walks away. It’s obvious to everyone that it’s far from anybody’s best. Not long from there three men harass an actual security guard. ‘How much money do you make?’ He tells them it’s none of their business. Then they move on and try to speak to two women but the women won’t give them any attention, so low is their vibration and problematic their aura. Everyone is sullen and hardly anybody wants to be there. The place is almost empty. I remember the old man whose truck was stalled and nobody would help him in the cold and wind and snow with night approaching. I tried to help him but had difficulties. I am not a mechanic. A lady approaches me and looks at my coffee. I figure it’s not allowed. ‘Can I have the coffee here,’ I ask. ‘You can have the coffee. It’s that I am dying for a coffee also.’ She waits for an answer. I don’t know if she wants me to buy her a coffee. Outside I can see the night, the lights. There was a bread shop that used to donate to the homeless shelter where I worked. I notice it’s gone. I remember the shelter, for there were doors that looked as if they had spirits inside them, and there were many, many good men. And the shelter sat away from the lonesome one lane highway upon the top of a hill. I began work and you had to work part time to begin then, or I did, but I worked 88 hours a pay period which was 8 more hours than the full timers. And I learned much from everyone around me, and I learned many things about life but there is always much more to learn. Outside the window the wind blows cold and that particular town is dirty, grimy. There is some kind of bell affixed to a post. Maybe it is a Christmas bell. But the bell is broken. It’s inside must have fallen out, its ‘heart’ so to speak. The bell is then a shell. It has no heart. But who cares about the poor bell? Nobody. There isn’t even anybody around. The lights that guide the traffic turn. The ones that don’t, well they remain a rueful melancholic yellow. The radio said that storms will arrive. Storms. Ice. Hail. Colder air. As if the world there hadn’t enough trouble already. As if it needed more.
IT’S SNOWING
Snow falls
About that abandoned house
That reminds me
The abandoned road workers’ houses
That are still seen
On the roads of emptied Spain.
When we were little, we liked to go see him
Although our mothers told us:
-Don’t go, he’s going to know you
And then he will come to tell us
That you have done something wrong.
We liked it
Because this character
“The road laborer”
That cleaned the roadsides
At the entrance of the towns
Lefting his jacket in a ditch
And doing nothing
Maybe sometimes playing a guitar
Found without ropes
Settled down with his back
Against the wall of the house
To see if any stranger came
On the regular bus.
Also, because our mothers
Bad-tempered and with bad temper
Told our parents
Whom we always saw
Touching their balls:
-You’re lazier than the road driver’s jacket.
What made us laugh
Like he does to us now
Seeing falling snow
Under the roadster’s bedroom
That has stuck his head out the window
Scratching it hard with his hands
starting to fall off all his dandruff
Above our heads
That we thought
It was snow falling from Heaven’s ass.
Heaven that, to us, seemed
That was a woman’s ass
His wife, terrible beast
For her Moon and stars tattoo.
Also, she made us laugh, and a lot
When we listen to her
Telling him jokingly:
-Come in, roadster, close the window
You will see a year’s worth of yarn
And shit for a month
More pieces of cob
That you put behind this ark
Hairy as do you see.
-But what a mess and a glutton you are
He answered her with grace.
-Daniel de Culla
My country, don't be fooled by your beauty The steps are on the path of the lovulas, My eyes rejoice in the reflection of your gaze Your name Uzbek is on my face. Sometimes, I think in the quiet night, Maybe life is what you miss On the day I lived with sweet longing, Your glorious history written in verses. Yes, I praise your beauty Again, I applaud your honor I can't get enough of praising that garden of yours The Motherland, which I cherish in the depths of my heart. Maybe I won't write poems about you I don't write books like great poets, Maybe my ink pens are weak But, in my heart, you are always the Motherland.