"sisyphean" poems
C'mon out to the rattled caves
the deep-sea malaise
rested in the grey metamorphs
of an ancient coastal chain
Where Sisyphean slips of tectonic rifts
pull the molding clay
like play-dough
and old rock that turns anew
churned into
great catacomb stele
Babylonian towers far away
from the great
Mesopotamic
interstate
Surrounded by the immumerous trees
the military sharpness of their pine
quills writing their mark in the dirt
for a hundred turns or so
only to be rearranged
into the great intercontinental soil
Truly
multisolipsistual
And on the aggregate
held open the mists
of the vast expanse of ocean
beyond L.A
and stole the fruits of the tiny parceled condominium rainwater
from distance far away
angry men shouting--
"Give us back our life blood, GOD **** YOU!"
Filling the tanks of their fleshomobiles
running around and sweating it out
trading it for cloth and wiping their brow on
brown shirts
perturbed and disobeyed
But that great man with the chin muscatche
brought the rough riders out of their dome
into the frontier, riding trains
Off they go!
Seeking paradise in the sands
and the trees
and the coastal breeze
dreaming
of a world owned and seen
by the world
by man
and by all these things
It would be grand
But that rock has been seen before
in Luarentian islands long ago
or perhaps a great FUJI-SAN of the west coast
worshiped by critters and dinosaurs
You are late to the game, sweet dreamers, you!
These monuments give to honor due
not you,
no sir did you build these things?
did you mold these things
with the patience of a father
with the consequentiality
of the womb
and a motherly affection
for all things true?
the gift is for you,
remember your father's gifts
sweet princes of the earth
because they will outlive you.
And I walk along the stream
stepping upon these little bits of Yosemite
Pulverized mountain rocks
Renal Stones of the diseased
to which the water flushed out deeply
and cured the grey things from all that left them
displeased
hoping for more than just selfies
and sticking it to god's face
laughing at half-dome
climbing it and getting the better of ourselves
Believing we have achieved bliss
When in reality,
there is nothing to this which we can reach.
Aug 19, 2018
Aug 19, 2018 at 5:19 PM UTC
The good thing about a tortoise
is that he carries time on his
shoulder
and does not have to run
to cry.
He is like a river
flowing backward,
climbing the rocks on which her mother
had bitten
to un-feel the pain of origination
(so as to cast a glimpse on her nest
in the mountain).
He is a figure, a language, a sun
whose force is sustained by his own spirit -
unrelated: unlike a star,
a night, a candlelight.
He is his own version
of the light and the rite
and the fight sisyphean.
© LazharBouazzi
Mar 29, 2018
Mar 29, 2018 at 6:17 PM UTC
The good thing about a tortoise
Is that he carries time on his
shoulder
and does not have to run
to cry.
He is like a river
flowing backward,
climbing the rocks on which her mother
had bitten
to un-feel the pain of origination,
so as to cast a glimpse on her nest
in the mountain.
He is a figure, a language, a sun
whose force is sustained by his own spirit -
unrelated, unlike a star,
a candle, a night.
He is his
own version
of the light,
and the rite,
and the fight
Sisyphean.
© Lazhar Bouazzi, Carthage, TUN, July 18, 2016. Revision made on July 25, 2016.
Jul 25, 2016
Jul 25, 2016 at 6:36 AM UTC
~
loving
you
was
a
**Sisyphean
task.**
Feb 20, 2016
Feb 20, 2016 at 11:58 AM UTC
I awaken to find my mind either a complete blur, a fuzzy, foggy place, or a place of a maelstrom of thoughts, ideas, and emotions, some from the previous day, some from even before that. Electrifying anxiety, paralyzing fear, crippling doubt and depression are the orders of the day, when I fully awaken. I eat, then take my pills, to get my thoughts in some semblence of order. I go through the day, feeling trapped by problems my medications cannot control. I find myself either blaming everything and everyone else for said problems, or ripping out my own entrails as I blame myself - one extreme or another. I have visions, dreams, hopes of success, but then my depression, or whatever it is, kicks in, and wipes out those dreams, reducing me to a mess of shattered hopes and dreams. This is why I spend most of my days on tumblr, where people see me for who I am, but even there, people judge and discriminate against me, for whatever I have. On tumblr, I have friends that I roleplay out various characters with, different personalities, sometimes variations of myself take shape. Tumblr is the only place where I can seemingly have a reality in which I have control. The Internet is my portal to reality, my line of defense against what could be described as agoraphobia. But I still desire the company of people my own age, physically, rather than electronically, but I do not have the same interests of most of them, and am scared to death of doing so. The very thought of meeting a large group, or even an individual, sends me into a panic attack-like state, then I fall quickly into a state of depression because of that. I hate myself for that anxiety, the awkwardness I have. Loathe is the correct word. This is why I hide behind a computer screen. It may not be perfect, but I find it easier to interact online. I do not know how to translate how my characters act to my own actions, as some have suggested for me to do. I have been told that I need to choose to get out of this hole in which I am trapped. It is a struggle every day to even get enough energy to care, much less try to get out of the hole. The only way out is by climbing a steep cliff, covered by snow and ice, cut by the howling, bone-chilling wind, with only two hooks, in my hands, to claw my way out, fighting the falling snow and ice, occasional rock and hail, sleet too. There seems to be no place to make a camp, where I may rest, only the long, arduous, grueling climb, my vertical trek, my seemingly Sisyphean task that awaits me. A choice that may seemingly **** me. People have suggested that I turn to the supernatural, but that is a fool’s bet, a folly of hope, a wish of the people who build their castles in the sky.
Dec 2, 2013
Dec 2, 2013 at 2:46 PM UTC
Truckled to the heavens
Atlas could do little
But brood
On the sisyphean futility
Of his task.
An atom
Hidden in the tail
Of a fractal
Cannot see the form
It helps shape
So in time
It becomes a thing
Turned on itself.
And with each turn
Atlas bent
Until he was as
Crooked as a sixpense
As stooped as a dowager
As prostrate as a slave.
And when he could bend
No more
He was ground
Into rock flour
The stars on his shoulders
Falling into the sea
Five fingered starfish
That scuttled across
The ocean floor
Until they found
Their land legs.
A thing turned on itself
Cannot see
The pixelated shape
It forms
Atom by atom
Cannot see
Its purpose
And even if that purpose
Seems otiose.
It counts.
Jan 26, 2010
Jan 26, 2010 at 6:17 PM UTC
Assembled forces
Around the heaven of the Moon
The heaven of Gabriel the Holy
Influences the beings
Fragile to death
Who can pull out the geese bird?
From the clay ***
Without breaking it
Not the life’s ignorant disciple
Nor the Sisyphean planetary orphan
Neither the life’s exhausted ascetic
A key-maker a treasury holder
Yet I do want to embrace the whole
Visible and invisible entities
You may celebrate your prodigy
And mock my naivety
And immeasurable love
I’ll do this until I dry
As a dew
Until I become a piece
Missing from terracotta
Kept for ages in the sand of Baghdad
Where Shamash made crisps from
The skin of the humans
So they may think they’re
Reptiles
Red eye killers
Apr 18, 2012
Apr 18, 2012 at 7:42 AM UTC
I wake up on my sofa after
Work, knowing she needs
Workman's hands to hold
Hammer and nail at
Points she's chosen for her
Pictures.
A stronger back for heavier
Things, but I'm spent. Work is
War, now. Power drill, pistol.
I bark orders at privates,
Not warnings at young, spiteful
Carpenters
Fresh from school
With too
Much product in their
Hair to want to wear their
Mandatory
Hard hats.
My heart skips beats when I
Lift. I count falling stars
At daytime climbing stairs.
Lie to concerned foremen.
A brain-soul-body Bermuda
Triangle of energies lost.
I have love to last her lifetimes,
Shoulders to rest her weary,
Closed eyes against or dig her
Fingernails into, gasping.
But for now, the ceiling I gaze
Up at stares back down judgingly,
Not recognizing this frowning
Ghost of the mud-covered grin I
Carried a few, short years ago.
The futile clawing and sliding of
A minuscule man climbing a
Colossal statue of himself.
May 23, 2017
May 23, 2017 at 3:13 PM UTC
My heart is a stone
Rolling slowly uphill
At an easy, steady pace
They say life's not a race
They say you're never alone
But it's all just useless, I know
Gravity grips hard with each step
This treacherous slope grows steep
And helpless, I sow what I've reaped
As I plummet back to the valley below
Pulled two directions by my heart beguiled
I climb, fall, climb, fall, climb and fall again
Still longing for you, for those days long gone
And still trying like hell to get past this, move on
My feeble heart forever stuck in this Sisyphean trial
Aug 23, 2019
Aug 23, 2019 at 1:03 AM UTC
We the people
are a Sisyphean collective
our punishment: progressing humanity
With fiery eyes and frothing mouth
we charge towards its surfaces
bashing those with scrawny shoulders
ricochet like sparks from flint
watch as we fall back
how it moves a fraction of a hair length
knowing that
if all our efforts were combined
surely, humanity would’ve accelerated
But we the people
are a democratic anarchy
each one to their own
Each thrusts towards their own direction
each blow is counterbalanced by another
as we foam like sea surf on a shoal
crushing from all sides
and our humanity
crawls in place amongst us
For we, the people
are a paradox of will
the driving, and the stalling force
Insignificantly small, with significant resistance
the viscous drag that ebbs and flows
a choreography of chaos and confusion
we are so many
so many more
And humanity is singular
a monument to our failures
its minuscule fluctuations
a testament of battles fought
but from a far, and from way forward
it is but a speck of dust
which, ever silent, floats
throughout the cosmos
Sep 18, 2019
Sep 18, 2019 at 7:06 AM UTC
Unloving thou is but Sisyphean,
Like scoria craves mixing with sea salt.
Thus akin to night and day we're but twins
Whose burning candle is never to halt.
But ever brighter than snow veiled mountains,
And perpetual as the golden Amaranth,
Yet as pure as heavens silver fountains,
Thrice fairer than the moon of the May month
Or the sea's mighty glow against the moonlight.
Always in full spate if she’d be a stream,
To draw us in a realm of sheer delight
Where daylight to fade shall be but a dream.
So true love is a gem precious than gold
Both young and old in their palm crave to hold.
©Kikodinho Alexandros
Jumeira, Dubai
22 October 2016
Oct 21, 2016
Oct 21, 2016 at 6:11 PM UTC
Into our fun house of mirror neurons,
a favorite Fellini character strides
distorted perhaps,
but reflected clearly enough,
none the lesser for our wear.
Who is it? Which one?
It’s truly hard to decide.
It could be that brute Zampanò,
his chain unpopped,
and as ever demanding our attention...
Or the cypher, Steiner,
teetering on edge
to tell us his secrets...
Or a voluptuous
la Saraghina,
reveling in our riveted eyes...
Or gentle Giulietta,
chasing her voices,
their whispers that echo ours.
It doesn’t matter who, in the end.
Better yet, let’s take them all,
and crowd them close in.
What matters is,
we ask they try
a seeming simple task—
touching tongue to nose,
or elbow to chin—
and we watch
their attempts, together.
Strive and fail.
Strive and fail.
Strive and fail.
These are the Sisyphean rhythms
we’ll need to learn.
We have our limits,
but empathy is endless.
Aug 18, 2010
Aug 18, 2010 at 4:18 PM UTC
I was 18 and surrendered to a Van Gogh sunset,
The Aegean Sea a calm mirror,
Plato’s sun, rose-red and dying,
A shift from wind to breeze,
Each night negotiates a calm.
There were eight of us
Inside the cave,
A cathedral inside a mountain,
Our home, high upside a cliff,
The mountain shepherds unhappy
With our stake,
Until we saved the lamb.
We’d found each other,
An octad to a family formed,
Wandering, drinking, annoying the Swiss,
Our freedom dangerous,
Beyond control,
Our odd desire to just be.
Hell, we were reading Hesse,
One of their own,
Our Swiss welcome spent,
They’d had enough,
And so we left for Athens,
To dance and sing,
And tender the sad patience of the Greeks.
Eighteen hours on the ferry to Eos,
People barfed huge arcs over the railing,
Then sat down to reread the headlines for the hundredth time,
Eos was an island of no cars, sparse electricity,
An abundance of religion
And a constant flow and cask of wine.
Retsina, the barrel sealing resin of the Aleppo pine,
An odd and unmistakable taste,
It left a hangover like a warning shot,
The only cure to drink again.
We spent Easter high on acid,
In the back pews of a church,
A thousand years of candles
White walls black with carbon,
A priest, a chalice, the smoking thurible,
A pendulum of incense and pure thought,
The ancients practiced faith with all their senses.
On cloudy moonless nights,
We walked the miles home,
Sandals slap on a sugar sand,
The beach ours, all of it
So dark we could only hear the sea,
The rhythm of the waves like the downbeat of the earth,
We plodded to its dark measure in a line,
On return, from village, church,
Or a lover’s walk through miles of wild daisies,
Until the rediscovered goat path up to our cave,
A Sisyphean task, a find each time,
Drunk, ****** alive, young, nuclear with hope and desire,
We would change the world,
We would mend kind all the broken parts.
And in our cave,
The sounds of others making love,
Rough grunts and soft sighs, whisper kisses,
I would think and dream,
And ride the silver of those waves
Our lives like skipping stones,
Brief, beautiful, and bound.
Mar 10, 2016
Mar 10, 2016 at 7:11 PM UTC
To Death and You, the terrible two:
Can you feel your grip loosening around my neck?
Can you feel me getting lighter, smarter, farther all the time?
Can you feel my heartbeat finding its own pace,
Not matching yours, as it did before?
Can you feel me slipping into
Happiness for a change?
We were once a Sisyphean process
Low ups and lower downs
We once were endless
Or so we thought
Can you feel my lightness overcoming your dark?
No longer in the shadows of the consuming unlit?
Do you think it’s true, what they say?
Do we not know what we have until it’s gone?
I think so, not so much for you as for me
I didn’t know how much you held me down
Until I sailed the skies of the blissful unknown
This is one last hoorah for the lowest of lows
One last note to those I leave behind in the dark
One last toast to Death and You, my all-consuming terrible two
Jun 9, 2013
Jun 9, 2013 at 10:26 PM UTC
Carla,
Whom I love and regret in equal measure,
Told me to talk less and think only in the morning.
It’s unfair, she said, for someone with your demons,
To obsess past mid day.
You will only exhaust yourself,
Become dizzy from looking over your shoulder.
It’s the sparrow’s lunch you eat, she said
Afterwards you think only of suicide,
It’s your pathetic answer to everything.
You have a propensity, an absolute need to confess, Carla advised me,
You see sin as an obligation,
As a necessity to fuel your ridiculous notion of salvation,
Repentance is a shell game,
No sooner have you apologized for being yourself,
Than you begin sinning all over again.
Your quest for innocence is a self-selected Sisyphean task.
I told her I had no idea what she was talking about,
And that if she wanted to save me she had to speak in simpler terms.
Quit looking for the meaning in things, Carla said,
Life is lived on the surface,
What we really fear is not that we will die,
But how we will die,
I mean good god,
The insane Christians
Have us picturing death
With nails driven through our hands and feet,
Hanging from a crucifix,
Can you imagine the indignity,
While some low level centurion,
Stabs at us with a sword,
I mean really,
Hauling crosses up mountainsides
Being laughed at and scorned in our weakest moment,
The drama is laughable,
When the absolute truth is most of us
Will die peacefully in our sleep,
Gone without even knowing the party is over.
Replace your metaphysics with a game of chess, Carla told me,
At least do psilocybin once in awhile
And have a genuine spiritual experience,
And she held up her hand for two more glasses of scotch,
Neat,
And lit her cigar.
Aug 30, 2016
Aug 30, 2016 at 7:10 PM UTC
One:
We're all victims of our own vices,
Those things that cause a cosmic crisis,
Rather than attacking the ones that dwell within us,
We lash out at the ones we find outside in others.
It's a case of right enemy, wrong battlefield.
And those of us who do fight the war inside,
Are fated to fight on two fronts,
It may be a Sisyphean task,
But we will not be judged by our failures,
We will be judged by our efforts,
Our resilience,
Our hope,
Our spirit.
Two:
The greatest evil a human will face is not the devil, not a demon, not an animal but another human and the irony of it all is that it is the evil we can not live without.
Three:
Man is political by nature,
His ego inherited from his father and mother,
And his struggle created by his creator.
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015 at 6:38 PM UTC
You are not and can now be totally independent; a vile, tiny worm is making its way into your flesh, like some infectious disease, a desperate, hypocritical attempt to change anything in a dignified way, a completely meaningless, pitiful series of wild instincts that have lost their wings; sooner or later, with quiet indifference, the crumbly lump that obstructs the network of blood vessels with its heavy Sisyphean rocks will just fall off your heart, so that you can prolong your life for at least twenty or thirty seconds.
Every minute, the permanent, indestructible Maya veil of transience floats over your head. Timelessness makes life uninteresting, which cannot be started anew every single day, because secretly everything remains a reflex of your selfish body, an everyday simultaneous. Like a faded, lifeless donkey skin, the pores of your skin also feel the template, the cancer of superficial exhibitionism.
As if not only the Hangman's death, but also the consciousness of loneliness, that you can count on no one but yourself, has been breathing down your neck for a thin life. Knee pain, torturing hemorrhoids, a hearty cholesterol bomb that have taken over your life; from the medium of Time that separates you, perhaps a helping hand will bend down to you, to help you up early, because a gray, old eternal child looks back at you from shop windows.
From the echoing darkness of the underworld, some secret, inner fall will begin, which perhaps only you yourself can understand; existence itself is a jungle, a withered Nirvana-desert, a riddle, which it would be good to finally solve, so that you can know and understand what your task and business is here!
Sep 5, 2025
Sep 5, 2025 at 12:44 AM UTC
Like as heaven's golden eye
In all her timeless grandeur
Doth emanate to paint the sky
In polychromatic hues all o'er
At the break of dawn, so raced I
Briskly through woods of failure,
Yonder the mighty hill of success
That shimmered in the distance.
The closer I drew, the further the hill,
But despite the task seemed sisyphean,
Winds of hope came driving me still
Right through thorny thickets of men
That unto me said I'll never get uphill,
But though girthed with such ill omen,
I bore it in mind, at the end of day,
Even the sun fades into heaven's bay.
They tried to pull me down,
But, "giving up" ain't my name;
When at last I wore a golden crown,
They tumbled into a sea of shame
And there deep they didst drown
Till so soddened every part of them:
"For now every body knows my story,
I rest not till I behold clouds of glory."
©Kikodinho Edward Alexandros,
Los Angeles, California, 8/4th/2019.
#Words Of Wisdom
Aug 5, 2019
Aug 5, 2019 at 1:11 AM UTC
When you care so much about someone,
friend or a partner.
You'd do so much for them.
Like give them kidney or even take a bullet for them.
But when you know that they don't care about you as much as you do about them,
It aches inside.
My lungs begin to fill up with shells and flowers,
and suddenly it's hard to breathe.
It's almost like a dizzying Sisyphean curse spinning you around in the Earths orbit,
and everything becomes blurred.
You then suddenly begin to wonder if anyone cares,
because after all the world is a lonely place.
So give me one more cup of coffee and i'll be gone.
Feb 2, 2015
Feb 2, 2015 at 7:10 PM UTC
All I seem to remember
Are the hollow eyes
Peeking from behind damp walls
Walls dripping with misery and the cold winters day
In a land where no flowers break through the heavy clay
Even though they try their best
The beast always catches them at the stem
Tears the blossoms out in calm rage
The feeling sold by its empty eyes
Like a useless spy
Wandering the streets sick with smoke
And liquor
Under starfull skies
Praying to God for a comet
To yell my wish at:
“Oh,to be more than just a clump of cells and flesh and bones
Patching together my soul
Creating something mine
The only thing I can call so“
Because I know each breach carved with the steady occupation
I could lead your hands into the gaps dug by
My litospheric plates moving
shifting
colliding
Far too soon
Now I have forests and mountain ranges
Peeking out of my veins
Spreading the dark ecosystem of my mind
I can feel the frost and the gloom biting trough my skin
The fog covering my every inch
Fangs dangerously close to bones
The only part clean of the parasites
Unlike my tunnel-disrupted skin
The penetrated veins sticking out of it
Slowly decaying away
While my heart fills my leaking body with new blood
Sisyphean effort
The life that goes to waste
But stains the flesh a vibrant red
My half-alive corpse
The only thing radiant on this grey lifeless street
The monster slowly kneels down to my side
Pierces its talon through my bone
Sells me to death
Leaves my core to rot
Defeating its defences like an unknown weapon
Injecting terror into the cold white stuff tangled around my heart
stuck around my veins
It sets me onto fire
Letting its own creation burn
For the sake of its pleasures
As the luscious woods burn to just skeletons and dust
The hollow eyes filling with the shadows of the light
As it snarls
A twisted caricature of a smile
Nov 12, 2024
Nov 12, 2024 at 1:46 PM UTC
Things are ok
Not dead and currently that’s a good thing
Optimism abound,
Climbing mountains only to jump off the other side
Hoping to find some understanding or meaning
Or even a median in space, or time
Precariously traversing the rock face
Walking down a fine white line
Seeing the whole world unfolding before you
Only you’re too focused on climbing
To appreciate the view (Tunnel Vision living)
Faltering now, nascent feelings of inadequacy cloud your mind
Who are you kidding?
Latent feelings of inadequacy? (Yes)
Cliché existential crises? (God Yes)
Denial? (Don’t stop!)
Atoms for Peace on repeat (Before your very eyes)
Sinking into it like a warm bath
A glass of absinthe and a head full of dreams
Though you aren't asleep
Sinking into that hole, it feels like dying
The room spins
Senses rapidly disintegrate, one by one
A nothingness deeper and more profound than anything
Timothy Leary knew
As your head dips below the surface
A ******* child, D.M. Turner minced with Kerouac
Or a laudanum laced Thomas De Quincey
You saw god that night,
The layers peeled away
It was pure chaos and caustic fear
Brimming with breathtakingly beautiful apathy and acceptance
Quantum clairvoyance springs forth
You see how the cards will fall
God reminds you, “Everyone dies alone”
And you know the truth, he doesn't have to tell you:
God isn't there when you die
Smiling peacefully as your Sisyphean plight dissolves into the night
Jul 29, 2014
Jul 29, 2014 at 8:21 PM UTC
Can't make me want to stay alive.
It's sisyphean if you try.
You can, however, make things worse--
Suggest a ride inside a hearse.
-- Before, that sentiment held true,
But that's before my meeting you!
With you I've found a taste of mirth
And more-- A motive on this Earth.
Apr 17, 2022
Apr 17, 2022 at 4:36 AM UTC