We live on the dark street at night,
Rows of old houses huddled in the cold.
Only one small door has a hesitant light
Glowing yellow against wooden gold.

Flowers and weeds are crushed and dry,
Wreathing withered, brown, grass yards.
Frozen blades crack as feet walk by,
Only wild things cross the hay-like swards.

Old people huddle near the wood stove
Or bake bread and pies in the oven.
Their little dogs are let out for a minute’s rove.
Even they shy away from a world so frozen.

The world of black and white
Dims sight and stultifies the senses
It dulls imagination.
So one goes to sleep and waits.

Waits for morning and
The first ray of sun
Reminding one of spring
And the light, warming the street.

December 2020

It is fascinating to listen to the world wake up in the morning. It’s as though everything is still and frozen in time that even the birds are hesitant to start their morning songs. But then suddenly, as the first stretch of daylight crawls across the lines and rows of rooftop houses, you can hear the whole Earth start up in stages. First the signaling of the distant trains, their own morning song in a way I suppose. Then the rest of the neighborhood follows suit in a chorus. Car engines rattle on to melt the ice off their windshields and they too, groan and moan not yet ready for the daily grind. I picture people sipping their coffee while their kids quickly and hastily brush their teeth to make it to school on time. The buses stagger in lines to greet them at their doorsteps. One by one the birds unruffle their feathers in the treetops and begin to rise in song. The streets that just lay undisturbed moments ago, pristine with a thin layer of 4AM dew, are now bustling with car exhaust and scurrying street cats who are simply trying to get out of the way. And you in the midst of your tossing and turning murmur something in your sleep and I wish I could lie here forever.

Snakeskin,
Crawled into it and it felt good.
Real good.  Good enough to live in.
Forked tongue slips in and out;
Poison drips, fangs cannot be contained.

Eating all, choking on frogs, going for bigger prey
Until all is gone, gone, gone -
Lining up to pet the snake, feel the skin next to theirs
******* out brains to fill craniums with crap.
And the world has gone mad, bad, and sad.

Houses are like little cages
Little cages that is trapping
Every little incidents inside it;
Trapping every little shriek
Trapping every upsetting stories;
One wants to tell
It locks everything inside
Houses only shows you what you want to see;
It only displays what you wish to see;
It shows you what a normal house should be.

Shema (“Listen”)
by Primo Levi
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You who live secure
in your comfortable homes,
who return each evening to find
warm food and a hearty welcome ...

Consider: is this a “man”
who slogs through mud,
who has never known peace,
who fights for scraps of bread,
who lives at another man's whim,
who at his "yes" or "no" lies dead.

Consider: is this a “woman”
shorn bald and bereft of a name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void and her womb as frigid
as a winter frog's?

Consider that such horrors have indeed been!

I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your beds
and again when you rise,
when you venture outside.

Rehearse them to your children,
or may your houses softly crumble
and disease render you equally as humble
so that even your offspring avert their eyes.

Primo Michele Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in ****-occupied Poland. It has been described as one of the best books by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His unique work The Periodic Table was shortlisted as one of the greatest scientific books ever written, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Levi's autobiographical book about his liberation from Auschwitz, The Truce, became a movie with the same name in 1997. Keywords: Holocaust, poem, Italian, translation, man, mud, woman, bald, nameless, houses, homes, bread, eyes, womb, empty, void, frigid, lifeless, horror, horrors, hearts, write, etch, engrave, inscribe, children, offspring, disease, avert, reject

If you were looking inside me
Pushing passed the bones, what I'm hiding,
Could see through the glass,
Using your sight to pull me apart
Maybe then you'd see my tired heart.
Wrapped in veins, trailing strains to others.
Meeting somewhere in troubles.

We speak like we are good at goodbyes,
Lost in words without conceiving the thought,
Really we are good at leaving.
Really I'm not good at breathing,
My life is just a scribble I jot down,
A person less than a thought now.
So if I'm putting my life on the line and fall
Does it even make a sound?

If you were looking inside me,
I bet you'd find a lot wasn't working
Just a defensive laugh while smirking
But they don't look around these parts,
They don't look around these parts

How long did it take
To scrub the taste of you
Off of my mouth?
My gums were bleeding by the end
My bed was a mess
Sheets torn, this way and that
A futile attempt
To make them reek
Of anything other than you

There is a house on Southeast Bank.
It simmers as it has done since the 1900s,
it's been derelict for at least a decade now.
Sometimes, the local teens hangout and drink underage
but mostly it sits
Patiently.

There is a living room in the house.
The house that sits on Southeast Bank.
A leather reclining armchair lays, sprawled across the carpet.
A carpet in which the previous mother of the house would've claimed "costs hundreds" and "came from Egypt".

As daylight stretches toward the bookcase.
The bookcase in the room,
The room in the house,
the house that sits on Southeast Bank.
It's not unexpected to see
all the dust that flitters in the air
dancing to the tune of what was once life
a place for the living.
Reminders that once there may have been a family here.
But who knows.

Who knows what happened to them,
did the kids grow up too fast?
Did the parents split up?
Did someone die before their time was due?
And it's all written in the dust.
The dust that haunts the bookcase
the bookcase in the room,
the room in the house,
the house that sits on Southeast Bank.

From far away they come
hard men all,
mercenaries under a foreign sun

oblivious to its rays they
bare all, turning puce red
or peel, under hard hats,

cut down jeans, working boots,
tool belts, like desert rats
fighting for a new horizon

Scouse, Manc, Paddy
nicknamed and framed
by the mockery of their peers

shouting language across green lawns
not yet laid, that most definitely
won’t be heard in the select circles

that will inhabit these modern homes
castles one and all, individually the same
oh no, they won’t be welcome

lowering the neighbourhood tone,
four wheel drive and pick-up
replaced by Mercedes and BMW

Nature settles in again, to frame
like the scar around a wound
healed but never quite the same

So they move on, soldiers of fortune,
mercenaries under a foreign sun
building new structures to change our futures.