Get on.
Turn your back on death. Smile.
The journey of your being continue.
The days roll by like a train
diminishing in inevitable distance.
Nothing can stop tomorrow.
People disembark randomly
at the stations of your heart.
Friends, lovers and family
walk off into worlds of their own.
The train rolls relentlessly on,
faster, always and only faster.
You know the final destination.
Soon, you will be wholly ghost.
One life, your life, one lonely world.
The conductor calls out your stop.
Turn your back on life. Smile.
Get off.

After John Keats*

I have no fears that I may cease to be,
but long for the still silence of the grave.
Nothing remains in this world to long for;
nothing that I wish to keep or to save.
The best of youth, love and hope are vanished,
Driven away by time and loss and pain;
things that made the world a place to live in,
will never return in fullness again.
Just to breathe has no value in itself;
to wake to nothing does not make a day;
a walk to nowhere is not worth taking;
and nothing of value remains to say.
  Come death and be quick, take these blues from me;
  I’ve seen it all and no more wish to see.

"What is that noise?”
                      The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
                      Nothing again nothing.*

A blustery day. The wind drives
its chill through the cracks
in this old, groaning house.
It is the voice of the world
screeching: Let me in!
The same world I have struggled
so long to keep at a distance.
Both wind and world persist like poverty.
Seeking safety from everything outward,
I have tried to build castle walls
against a foreign, hostile world
in a little, shabby apartment.
Respite. Anonymity. Shelter from the storm.
Safe from the charms of money and women.
All effort in vain. It just can't be done.
No walls are thick enough
to quell the horrible screams
of this slowly collapsing century,
the sadly frigid remains of the dying day.
The undead bang on the shutters.
No cat fierce enough to fend off tomorrow.
A mind too weak to live in solitude.
A body that can't say no to desire.
Like a ghost of the future,
I am trapped by the tyranny of now,
listening to the wind beneath my door.

"the sound of rushing waters..."*

Give me the apocalypse,
give me prayers upon my lips,
I've come to know
what lies outside tradition.

Each time I've tried to change the past
I've heard a trumpet's mighty blast,
I know that morning will not help,
it's ending.

The vain escape from the womb
has only led us to a tomb
and in between just shadows
and delusions.

Life is hard and life is smart,
it drives the dagger into your heart,
it doesn't care at all
what you wish for.

Take the lovers, accept the gold,
do exactly as you're told,
fall in line, you know you're nothing
special.

Take up your apocalypse,
lift those prayers from on your lips,
no one's listening anymore,
it's over.

See all the breaches in the wall,
this culture is about to fall,
thank those cold barbarians
for closure.

Do not resist and do not fight,
your time is over and now it's night,
be grateful for the darkness
and the silence.

We tried so hard, we tried so long,
it wasn't worth a line of song,
accept your fate, it's over now,
surrender.

alles klar herr kommissar*

Write it all down with painstaking haphazardness,
carefully constructing nested memories,
exotic confections, negligible nuances,
dubious symbols of great insignificance,
an absolutely truthful pack of living lies.
Your readers deserve exactly what they get:
stumbling horses, nuzzling cassowaries, dead flowers;
the impenetrable clarity of an imagined life
imagining its mind imagining itself.

Ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.*

Live too long and words echo.
Sentences lose their bearings.
In the twilight colors wane.
New faces feel drably familiar.
Even the warm bodies of women
become gelidly generic.
Lovers live in other worlds.
War's clamor dwindles to murmurs.
Everything old, distant, familiar.
Memories as flea market post cards.
Wins and losses cancel out.
Too old for Jesus or ******.
Steady hands begin to tremble.
Books become a single manuscript.
Movies dim to one blurred screenplay.
Tomorrow just another cold front.
The future an inaudible rumor.
Caught in the evening of life
for a few more fading frames,
reluctantly faltering to the end.

This tiny apartment,
snug as a coffin,
claustrophobic as a tomb,
just large enough
to be a staging area
for the real thing.