Note: Dante compares the pitch in which the corrupt sinners are submerged to the tar used in the Venetian Arsenal. Also, the fictional character Alan Ogan Tren works at an emissions testing center in Fogtown.
Fhen M. has received multiple recognitions, including second place in the 1st Chito Roño Literary Awards in the Waray poetry (siday) category and several daily wins in the DYVL Siday Contest, a radio-based poetry competition. His published works include “Bamboo House” and “Homing” in Horseshoe Spring 2024 and Fall 2025, respectively. His poem “Shadow Puppet” has been accepted by Straylight Literary Magazine, and “Bookcase in the House of My Ancestors” and “Spending the Night on Planet Mars” appear in Well Read Magazine: Best of 2024, Vol. 1.
Standing here at the window is no worse than before,
Hollowness
in front of listless colours and woods.
Maybe the birds that chatter,
Louder now as I listen more,
and the flowering that will flower
and the nature-things that will grow
will heal me, and mine,
and make us as we were.
GROWN OUT OF
The ticktock of the clock recalls pre-digital me.
Awareness of self,
in a country lane surrounded by green bits,
or immersed in the silence of ticking clocks,
was poetry.
I was poetry. I was words scratched on paper,
later, clicked on keyboards on computers.
Typewriters shouldn’t be forgotten.
I used all mediums to express my expressibility.
The murmuring of breezes through trees,
the solemnity of aloneness in a room,
didn’t need pen, key or tab, just me there
to record me there. My moment.
Vulgar, and silly, of course.
I look back at the arrogance of life.
But I’m still turning over the pages,
clicking on to the next one.
And the next.
Recording my journey through life.
Fabricating a storyline.
CAPO DI MONTE
A porcelain figure stooping
slightly, legs close together,
right arm held down, slightly
away from body.
Left arm hugging a tankard
midriff,
head nodding slightly
to follow the upper body’s stoop.
Ever so slightly about to tip
over, feet though, barely visible,
tight
on the deep, white podium.
Dirty white, save a golden
band topping the tankard.
Fuzzy hair, and young boy’s face
from where I sit
glancing at the corner
where the porcelain figure stands
atop the cabinet.
Alan Hardy has for many years run an English language school for foreign students (in UK). As well as Synchronized Chaos, he’s been published in such magazines as Sideways Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Candyman’s Trumpet, Envoi, Iota, Poetry Salzburg, The Interpreter’s House, Littoral, Orbis, Pulsar, South, Lothlorien, 100subtexts, Fixator, Chewers, Feversofthemind, Suburban Witchcraft and others. Poetry pamphlets Wasted Leaves (1996) and I Went with Her (2007).
DON’T LET THE CROWD SHAPE YOU, THEY DON’T KNOW YOUR NAME LIKE YOU DO.
THEY DON’T HEAR THE QUIET BATTLES YOU’VE ALREADY SURVIVED IN SILENCE.
BREAK FREE.
EVEN IF YOUR HANDS ARE SHAKING.
FIRE WAS NEVER CALM BEFORE IT LEARNED TO BURN.
FOLLOW YOUR HEART, EVEN WHEN IT TREMBLES IN FEAR.
ESPECIALLY IN THAT MOMENT.
A NEWBORN NEVER ASKS PERMISSION, IT JUST CRIES, AND THE WORLD LISTENS.
DON’T SHRINK.
DON’T FREEZE YOURSELF TO MAKE OTHERS COMFORTABLE.
YOUR LIGHT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE DIMMED, IT WAS MEANT TO BE SEEN.
LET YOUR VOICE RISE ABOVE THE NOISE.
SAY THE THINGS THEY TOLD YOU TO SWALLOW, SAY THEM ANYWAY.
BECAUSE TRUTH SPOKEN FROM THE CHEST HAS A WAY OF SETTING SOULS FREE.
IN A WORLD THAT TRIES TO TAME YOU, BE THE WILDFIRE.
NOT DESTRUCTIVE,
BUT UNDENIABLE.
AND HEAR THIS, THE DAY YOU STOP ASKING FOR PERMISSION TO BE WHO YOU ARE, IS THE DAY YOU FINALLY COME HOME TO YOURSELF.
Hassan Musa Dakasku is a Nigerian writer, a passionate advocate for youth well-being, a microbiologist, and a performance poet. He is an author whose work is rooted in vulnerability and personal expression, and he maintains a personal blog where he shares his insights and creative pieces.
From the series Creating the Image of the Human of the Future in Literature
Friends! I invite all of us, following the outstanding Egyptian writer Ashraf Abu al-Yazid, to take a friendly literary journey through the works of some of our colleagues, poets and writers, in order, through this small study, to try to understand how the image of the future arises from the fabric of the literary process both for an individual person and for the entire human civilization. Let’s start with Ashraf himself…
Ashraf Abu al-Yazid, Egypt
Reviews and comments about the literary travels of Ashraf Dali were left by dozens of respected poets and writers, including such big names as Ko Eun, Cao Shui, Olga Medvedko, Anna Stelia, Mariela Cordero, Ismail Diadier Haidara, Keshab Sigdel, Taghrid BouMerhi… The new book about the literary traveler Ashraf brings together dozens of literary and intellectual voices from the Arab world, Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, forming a rich human and creative panorama around the author of The Silk Road, A Street in Cairo and Shamus.
For some, he is primarily a poet; for others it is a traveler, translator, journalist or cultural ambassador. Yet all participants agree on one important truth: he is the architect of a cultural project that transcends national boundaries and embraces a broader human horizon. Readers of The Literary Traveler come to the clear conclusion that the book is much more than just a tribute to an individual. This is documentary evidence of the extensive network of friendships and cultural connections that Ashraf Abul-Yazid built over decades of work and creativity. This is a book that tells through the writer’s travels the power of literature to build bridges between peoples, and the ability of the written word to cross continents, like real travelers.
Shirani Rajapakse, Sri Lanka
smart
Sri Lankan poet Shirani Rajapakse’s literary landscape unfolds at the intersection of human rights, social justice, and the aftermath of conflict. Her narratives trace the subtle threads of migration and cultural identity, weaving the nuances of women’s experience and the broader human condition into the cosmic cycle of samsara through a deep Buddhist lens.
Refusing to be limited by geographic boundaries, Rajapakse’s pen bridges the local and the global, examining contemporary crises that resonate around the world. Her work is marked by a fierce commitment to correcting systemic imbalances, examining the sociocultural forces that shape women’s identities, and depicting the psychological scars of war.
Eden Soriano Trinidad, Philippines
Eden Soriano Trinidad is a Filipino poet, writer, editor, translator and passionate advocate of peace, cultural harmony and humanitarian values. Widely known for her lyrical depth and unwavering commitment to unity across caste, creed and racial lines, she has become a distinctive voice in contemporary world literature. Her poetry celebrates love, reconciliation and the common humanity that unites us. Through her words and actions, Queen Eden—as she is affectionately known in literary circles—continues to build bridges between cultures and inspire hearts around the world. Her poetry is not just art; it is a call for compassion, dialogue and lasting peace.
Eldar Akhadov, Azerbaijan / Russia
Eldar Akhadov is an explorer with the soul of a poet, who created many essays, stories, fairy tales and poems: North and South, cold and warmth, reality and myth, experience and memory – all these opposites in his works do not oppose each other, but form a single coordinate system. A person in this world is not just an observer, but a connecting link between various dimensions of existence. The value and power of Akhadov’s work lies in the fact that it not only describes life, but also helps the reader understand it. At the same time, according to the critic Alexander Karpenko, “The joy of life dominates the works of Eldar Akhadov. In his work, he returns the fragmented world to a state of original unity.”
Adel Khozam, UAE
Adel Khozam is a prominent poet and media personality from the United Arab Emirates. known for its innovative high-level international initiatives. Among them is Mansira, a cosmic poetic epic co-written by 86 poets from around the world. Khozam belongs to the modernist generation in the UAE, having played a seminal role in the development of Arabic prose poetry with a group of poets in the early 1980s. His creative legacy includes books covering not only poetry, but also philosophical works, novels, studies and translations. His significant contribution to increasing the global importance of poetry should be noted. In the Arab literary community, his work is recognized as one of the most innovative and profound among all Arab poetry of the first quarter of the 21st century.
Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Nigeria
Ayo Ayoola-Amale – multiple award winner, Nigerian
Ayo is a poet, artist, storyteller, and peacemaker whose work combines profound emotional honesty with figurative illustrations, creating a new language of liberation.
The founder of the poetry foundation Splendors of Dawn and the initiator of the global exhibition The Canvas for Peace, Ayo harnesses the power of imagination to deconstruct the systemic. She is also the creator of the acclaimed children’s series Every Child, which promotes the power of storytelling as a source of inspiration for future generations. Grounded in principles of inclusivity and compassion, Ayo’s literary and performance work seeks to transcend self-expression, actively amplifying the voices of marginalized groups and transforming social tensions into profound human connection.
Luis Carlos Prestes Jr., Brazil
Composer, film director, lyricist, journalist, writer, poet, actor, illustrator, and expert on cultural and economic development issues, Luis Carlos Prestes Jr. is the author of numerous literary and poetic works, including “The Heroic Trilogy.”
This book is utterly Brazilian in every sense of the word! It is a fusion of prose, poetry, philosophy, songs, music, graphics, and photographs that you can gaze upon and see a living, moving, carnival-lit, ocean-scented being called Rio de Janeiro! This book is a veritable carnival of folk heroic stories, a book imbued with metaphysics and the incredible reality of place and time. The work of Luis Carlos Prestes Jr. is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, like love at first sight, in the sense that once you fall in love with these rhythms and lines, it is impossible to unlove them.
Nia Amira Osman (Kurnia Suprihatin), Indonesia
The value of her work is defined not only by its undoubted artistic merits, but also by the qualities that make it undeniably unique and relevant in our challenging times of change and upheaval!
The poet’s lines are imbued with a grateful, reverent, and profound love for all life on earth. Nia travels extensively and knows firsthand the lands and countries she writes about. Invisible threads of spiritual kinship connect people on Earth, and this is clearly felt by everyone who has encountered Nia’s works, presented simultaneously in several languages! Stories from around the world are intertwined in Nia Amira Osman’s lines, glowing with the light of love! Her poems are filled not only with joy, but also with deep compassion and sadness… “From Indonesia with Love…” is a great book about Amira Osman’s love, which cannot belong to one person, because it belongs to the whole world. And the whole world belongs to her!
Margarita Al, Russia
Margarita Al’s postfuturistic cosmopoetics is directed toward the ontological and spiritual space of the future. According to the thinker and poet Konstantin Aleksandrovich Kedrov, her work is “poetic words awakened to life, thinking matter woven from light, time, and memory…”
Margarita Al’s vertical eight-step ladder—from phantasmagoria to synergy (Phantasmagoria, Frustration, Demassification, Discordia, Metamorphoses, Agape, Epiphany, Synergy)—is the ascent of the word through the states of being. The poet here is not an observer, but an operator of space. He is a discoverer, for whom consciousness is the microscope, and existence itself is the object of study. How can one retain the eternal in the finite? How can one enter infinity without losing oneself? There is only one answer: only through poetry. Language becomes an organ of memory and an organ of insight. Margarita Al is a rare poet. She cannot be compared. This is a vision, an insight, an art of living in the tension between eternity and the moment, between inhalation and exhalation.
Thought disintegrates to the state of a primordial particle, a primordial atom, and then—before the reader’s eyes—reassembles. This is not an image, but a vision, a form of vision dreamed of by the visionaries of the Silver Age. Margarita Al was predicted in many of the Futurists’ theoretical works. They were not allowed to bring this poetry to its culmination. But the 21st century has picked up their voice. And now it resonates… at a frequency where poetry becomes the only language of immortality.”
Summarizing our short literary journey, we can say:
– about the power of literature to build bridges between peoples, and the ability of the written word to cross continents like true travelers;
– about poetry’s ability to trace the subtle threads of migration and cultural identity between people’s feelings and thoughts; – that poetry is not just art, but also a call for compassion, dialogue, and lasting peace;
– that humans in this world are not just observers, but a link between different dimensions of existence; and that creativity can influence the return of the fragmented world to its original state of harmony and unity;
– the global significance of poetry and the literary word in general for the future of civilization;
– the power of contemporary narratives as sources of inspiration for future generations;
– that literary creativity can be at once permeated with metaphysics and the incredible reality of the places and times described;
– that great literature cannot belong to one person, for it belongs to the whole world;
– that poetry is becoming the only language of immortality.–
His friends from college told stories that made them laugh to convulsions about the moments, stoned or sober, when he pulled some classic stunt with an innocent face or could not remember and asked them to tell what he had done. When he lived in a distant city, they heard about the curious time police were called as he walked the edge of his high-rise apartment’s flat roof. He was there, he said, to catch the stars falling in August, as each one spoke a word he would set in a complex grid about the disasters timed to happen. We thought that drinking or doses of drugs had made him wild with wide eyes, calling us to babble at midnight and weeping until the first light. I saw him once on the ninth floor of a new facility opened nearby. The staff enjoyed him and listened to the music he played for hours on end. “I am the guitar of God,” he said. “The pills they feed me make me confess.” He told about walking one day naked in the park he reclaimed and made into Eden, where liquid colors dripped from the trees and the dead bees returned to life. He was the vessel of hid divinity, sent to heal the division of nations. The very last time I saw him, he stood as silent as death, against the wire dividing the milling inmates from guests. His hand, like fire, brushed mine and passed along the deathless virus. _________________________________________________
Figure Study
A catalog of used books described a half-price portfolio — photographs of figures — sepia compositions or shimmering monochromatic watercolors of natural beauty in bare rooms, and “softly edged outdoor portraits with the merest hint of color,” as if it described a dish of some culinary enterprise. Here are richly grained figures of saturated colors, capturing reflective moods, “simply the play of light caressing a body’s curves, charged with a landscape’s environmental meaning.” The figure is stripped bare of any transgressive dimension as a sign of enlightened love, a spare and geometric scaffold. If so, then the hell with it. These pieces are as innocuous as flocked wallpaper hanging in a hidden hallway. Here the camera’s alchemy has turned the body’s heft and weight into pure, non-perishing spirit. It turned totally Platonic, leaving the body husk behind. But the figure in clear light should remind us that beauty comes and goes, and flesh withers as soon as grass. We love what can not last. ________________________________________
NOTHING HAPPENED
Nothing happened. Nothing could. You slept, with sudden starts, as though to catch yourself from falling or pulling back from any close body stretched along your sprawling length, while you dreamed of dolphins in tumbling pods pushing against each other, pushing to shore and beached, as you broke the surface of sleep to gulp, vibrating with sound, breaths in sudden succession, the pumps of a starving heart. Inside this night, within your tussled bed, you looked — if anyone watched — collapsed on your back like Adam fallen from the ceiling, pushed by that digit extending from God, rigid and floating above this mortal world, on the backs of sensual angels, while he wore a night-shirt. Your skin — chalky like gesso, dried by desert exposure or shelterless days lived at sea straining to hear the “ping” of sonar echoes or the “click” of porpoise speech — contracted when drafts of night air raised like a ghost or a kiss the soft down at your hip, as your testicles shrank back in primordial fear inside the sack tingling within the bone vault of your thighs, unguarded as midnight passed. Nothing happened. Your sealed eyelids fluttered, as if they trapped a luna moth in a purse — and once opened the captive creature would fly with its wings fanned and reaching to feel freedom, but into a world of frost or predator birds. From my bed my lustral soul rose and followed, miles away, as I watched the shuffle of lights from occasional cars bend through panes of glass to reach and recede across the empty ceiling as I pictured you beside me, while nothing happened.
Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in a small village, near a nature conservancy, a green cemetery, and Amish farms.
When people are suffering through a period of struggle, fighting for a higher ideal, you get leaders who can look back and forth, like Janus, and create a respectable space for themselves, and their people in the future. But, when the times are good, we get leaders who manoeuvre their victory, because people are busy in their luxuries, riding on whose mad dreams, they rise to power, and then squander the fruits of the labour of their predecessors. For a simple comparison, let us think of the sons and daughters of a poor household, who have to sweat it out in life, and they become doctors and lawyers, and bring laurels to the their family and even to the country they belong. But, on other extreme, there are sons and daughters of a rich man, who sweat it out squandering that wealth, finally ending up as ‘lost to society’. When you are born with a silver spoon, there is every possibility of your losing it by the end of your term. The sons and daughters of the rich, who live on luxury of their parents, play ducks and drakes with unearned wealth, and do not care for the society and its norms, do everything the society considers foul, and, no wonder, end up as murderers and smugglers. If the parents had used the principle of “artificial scarcity” for these ‘blessed’ kids, and forced them to earn their own living, rather than live on the luxury of their parents, they too would have joined the life stream as valuable men and women. Rich people, who do not bring up their offspring like this, deny the society, sometimes best people who could have emerged from their ranks.
Was Ravana the sole manifestation of Evil? He had ten heads. It is more symbolic than real. Ten heads means ten or twenty and even more, may be thousands, because, he was manifest evil, which lived in the minds of the people. Every person harbours evil, and when we put it together, we need some emblematic figure.Call it Ravana. So, was Kamsa, the manifestation of Evil. Was Duryodhana the only foul mind in the Kaurava camp? He was the head of a whole body of evil structured in the Kauravas. And, in this evil,the greatest part was played by the ‘Pratigya’ (Vow) of Bhishma. Guru Daron, and great men, who did not utter a word when Draupaudi was being molested, were all a part of the evil which manifested in Duryodhana and Dusashana, and even in Karna. In a way, Duryodhana was the face of this morally corrupt world.
If we look down the ages, in ninth or tenth centuries, we find the warriors who were regarded as the best of men. Odysseus, Hector, Achilles. The Romans have warriors like Caesar who represent the popular mind of those times. In the period of Enlightenment, followed by Victorian period, we come to see, a world which loved writing. And, we see the heroes of this world were Poets, Philosophers and Novelists, like Gorky and Tolstoy. They manifested the popular mindset. People loved their writings, because they epitomised their mental and moral aspirations. Today, we are confronting a world in which every man is drained ofidealism. Good has flowed out of our veins. Junk has made a permanent home in our blood vessels. And it is stinking with ambition, success, passion for wealth, and a blind wish to topple everything that is good in our society, including subversion of all that was good and lofty in the past.
The present times are the times of luxury and people have reaped the fruits of a long spell of suffering and hard work on ideas, ideologies and philosophy. Here we have a whole population which believes in wealth creation, and success, and they need leaders who manifest this public passion. People who do not care for any moral considerations, for whom human life is a ‘deal’ and it is ‘energy’ which electrifies the internal wiring of the world, if these people elect leaders like Trump, they cannot be blamed for doing what they are doing. Leaders like Bibi are the manifestation of the people’s passion for commercial one upmanship, arrogance of power, and trampling all that is good under their feet. The fight of the mighties with countries like Ukraine and Iran sends a shivering message: The good is in steep minority. But it has the guts to stand up to the unified evil of the world, manifest in a few leaders.
THE NEO-HEROISM OF 21STCENTURY
Every age has its own heroes. The 20th century had Mahtama Gandhi, Jawahar Lal Nehru, and Rabindra Nath Tagore. The 21st century is entirely different from the 20th century. It is the century of loss of values, loss of vision, and loss of idealism. It ist a chaotic society which needs someone who can give a face to its moral anarchy. It is futile to look up to men, who could grow beyond their personal obsessions, and give a positive turn to human angst. If every age has its heroes, it has its villains too. The present century a suffers from the loss of language and meaning too. Education that is being served to the young students has lost its moral anchoring. The world is dreaming of becoming Lanka, the City of Gold once again. Can a sane person become a part of this mad dream? There is one more bigger question: Is this dream really mad? Does goodness, values, integrity, honesty have any chance beyond their academic relevance as a good old past? I wonder.
Moreover, in 1975, when Amitabh came up as an odd mix of heroism tempered with villainy, in Deewar, over the times, the line diving heroism and villainy has dissolved. These are times when evil has acquired respectability, and men who are only good, and not evil when required, lose their security deposits. This is a strange world andthe people who lead this chaotic world, are only those who can manifest this odd mix of heroism and villainy. The truth of these times is in conflict with the truth of previous centuries. And anyone who wants to succeed, has to acquire the charismatic qualities of neo-heroism, which manifest the Indian tradition of ‘tam sam dand bhed’ [success at all costs].If morality and ethics are the warf and woof of Indian ethos, we should not forget that these ethos belong to the general run of society, who were impressed by the teachings of saints and sages down the ages. Kings had their moral guides, but how many listened to the sane advice of the moral philosophers?
Even today, a king has to represent the general ethos of the society, which has lost faith in goodness, honesty, integrity, and even truth. Moral philosophers cannot epitomize their dreams of success and luxury. A king who manifests their new found values, (which is the truth of the present century) must manifest all that is good and bad in their dreams. Those who want Gandhi and Nehru and Tagore and their philosphies to guide the population of the 21st century, are perhaps too idealistic, or do not understand the dynamics of time. Time does not flow backwards. Evil has to be given its due simply because good is getting of currency. This is the essential lesson of Neo-Heroism which every one aspiring to lead the nation must absorb.
Dr. Jernail S. Anand, with 200 books to his credit [18 epics] is a Chandigarh-based top-ranking presence in the contemporary world literature, a polymath, and a vital architect of the 21st century ethical literature whose seminal work ‘Lustus: The Prince of Darkness’ challenges the moral complacency of our era. Founding President of the International Academy of Ethics, and Laureate of Charter of Morava [Serbia], Seneca [Italy], Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine, Czeck Rep] and Maxim Gorky [Russia] Soka Ikeda and Mahakavi Bharati (India) Awards, his name is inscribed on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia.
