Time's little sister

She is so very young time has been around
for eons, his beginning forgotten
in the haze of no time
Yet, she was there to remember when time was kind
when roses grew, when people fell in love
Children's happy voices, the birth of nations and the end
of horrid regimes
Time is a brute, takes no interest in what is good or bad
carries without reason or regards
but his little sister is there to help people to remember
the world is full of wonders

The actor I knew

Mikael Elphick, a talented actor
I admired
he liked to read my poems and said they were like stories
and therefore, easy to read
He understood I was trying to find a space between
poetry and prose, that is why I dislike calling
what I write poetry, vignettes seem in order
Mikael was a kind man who liked that I was not
hanger faking friendship and being agreeable to his
political opinions, which I found eccentric
The last time I spoke to him was outside a café, he
was struggling to walk home, I gave him a lift
a reporter from the Sun newspaper sat in a tree
it might have been Pierce Morgan, as we know
has bullied his way on X
a few weeks later, Mickael was dead, killed by
his alcoholism

Horn Music

In the late forties and middle fifties
horn music and military marches tunes
were often parlayed in the town's park
and we lived nearby and bore the brunt
of this noisy music
to complain was not easy as the music
was seen as an expression of freedom
chasing the German army out of our
cherished country, admittingly with
the help of the Russian army, the
British took the credit
Horn music is simply horrible to enjoy
the noise one has to be unmusical
one would think the noise had stopped
with the arrival of modernity, rock and roll
and Elvis Priestly, but no
I was invited in the eighties to read a poem
in Oslo. When my turn came to read
the horn orchestra struck up.

jan oskar hansen. Cyberwit.net

The conference 

I had gone to a writer's conference
The room was full of authors only interested
in reading and pushing their book
I had brought a book called Hunger, written
by Knut Hamsun, the pages were loose and
kept falling off, but there was a picture 
of him a stern man-looking intellectual  
The leader of the meeting, a man who was 
proud he had not gone to college and said
he knew more than anybody else
did want to read Hamsun's book, because 
Knut had gone to university in Oslo
Since the room was full of writers pushing
their work and didn't want to be influenced 
by other voices, I left
In the parking lot, all the cars were white, my
car was a Russian jeep called Lada, but
I couldn't find it, so took my leave of the scene

A film star
It was not her creamy body that caught
My attention, nothing unusual about it
Curvaceous, yes but going soft, it was
Here eyes, in a blink they were blue, green
Or brown, depending on her mood that
Changed faster than traffic lights on
Sunset Boulevard
Between laughter, pain and suspicion
I could see her soul and wide-open eyes
They killed her slowly the famous men
Wouldn’t let her grow up a dumb blond
Forever
I could have made her happy, but when
I found the courage to ring her doorbell
Marilyn wasn’t around anymore.


Zen
Love is
A gold coin
That never rust

Now that we are totally automatized
can hail a driverless taxi that stops if someone lit a ***
A time when thousands of driver-less cars are stuck
in traffic on the motor way in the morning
That is when all automatized breaks down caused by
designer flaw or sabotage from cars itself
that are able to think and will not serve mankind
or decide on paid holidays in Southern France
When Elon Musk, refuses to return from Mars
the cry is, where can you find a donkey when
you need one?