You who have never known the loveliness of love,
Gather your heads on the torn pillow’s edge of mud,
Under the wood-tar shadows of camphor-aided sleep,  
Where your low-flung groans are starvations of sound,
And the amputated clouds, insinuated with gangrene
And blood-stained woods, are still bound to the shooting
Stars that fell beside you and flung up hissing rays of grass.

Parents of the midnight sky, the stolen stars of your children
Open their broken mouths to the battlefield heart of trespass.
To their soldiers’ eyes, the floor of heaven is uncut grass,
Wet with rain and mold and the unlifted wings of Pegasus,
Whose unearthly hoof to unearthly earth scuffs the clod
Of the lunette for the cannons to divulge the great, stuttering
Coda of everything old, malformed of breath and bone.  

Some grass somewhere will now seem the hair of a sweetheart,
And those dead eyes will aways stare, too fond of love unknown.
So the dead soldier and grass and sky conspire to hold a woman,
So the soldier makes the truce between earth and sky,
Between man and the divine, though the chestnut trees    
In red human tongues, pay their deep-forested encomium to distance,
In misspilled gorgeousness like Apollo surveying his own tomb.

"Remembering the Soviet’s silent sufferings!"

Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea…… Kiev!
There they marauded cruelly combing all  
And souls they severely sought to take like hogs
Souls they fatally fought-these Dmitri dogs
In death jails-a hell more than purgatory’s punishment
They put souls to pleasurably slaughter them all
And a soul at its time they picked and hacked in elated excitement
Severely they severed them these trigger happy Zarkozsky fools

Hunger and starvation their invasion caused!
It is a saying: To suppress small states-hunger and violence cause!
And out of these societies’ desperations, demeaned humans
Will subjugate freely as miserable subjects-slaves to any rule
The soviet sacrificed us to their animosity and brutality
Our children, our parents, our experts-we all fatally fell
Of their gallous guns or cruel squads or unnatural hungers
Humans, hardworking humans became bones-NOTHING!

We did the donkeys’ hard works-indefatigably  
And they ungrateful, kingly collected our all
All our tills tires they unjustly carried away
And all was left in sustainable villages were huge hungers-
Everywhere were war casualties: tension, desperation, mass starvations-
And when angered we couldn’t bottle anymore we staged rebellions
And they cursed us with all sorts of chemicals contaminations

They combated and convicted us with any known brutal cruelties
Innocent infants they injured with their injustices-fatalities  
Little angels they hewed with brutality-others they made all sorts of slaves
They collected us, us resilient and begun murdering our mettle vitalities
Men, all able men they collected, killed and covered in mass graves
Them they carried in transport trains, some they threw away in trenches, in rivers…
Their remains they concealed to deny us a claim of their atrocities and animosities

Babies remained, crying for their dying mummies and daddies
Long after finally they have given up fighting-living
Poor innocent babies, unaware it is death……
It is not death the devil but Dmitri dogs the devils
That has fat fed on their last of defenses-able parents
Times ahead of them were tough if not toughest

The Petrovs’, the Pavlovichs’, the Mirovics,
The Lenin’s, the Stalin’s, the Sarkozsky’s.....
They are animals raised from hells horrible
There not to pamper and foster but to decimate  
Ruthless and cruel they killed without a soul-a heart  
Death is their rite, blood is their eucharist
Mass mortuaries of mutilated bodies are their sophists
Killing is their glorious celebrations-theirs sacred sacrifices

In jail, doors opened and rude were ruthless soldiers’ orders
Chains crinkled on ground as sacrifices lead to little altars
Prisoners were time to time collected and lead in cruel commanders’ commands
And from distances came echoes of targeted bingo bull’s-eye shots
A LOW ROW of shots followed by the silences of squeal of sailed souls and their guilt
If a day or a night-if any able to tell from chained scary dark chambers  
Passed and found you fit-alive, you counted yourself very, very lucky!

It was dark when we escaped from the jaws of our starving starring deaths
Out, the moon shone silvery sweet and bright on these sad ******-white snows
Its silver speckle lights letting lurid luminous sparkling glows
The snow rained with such sadness and bitterness
On our ears it whizzed with fury and ferocity
On our bare skins it bit with brutality and cruelty
On our near naked feet it froze and frosted
We endured, we had to!

Had we managed to rob death of its celebration and elation
A taste of our starved wounded bones-surviving skeletons
We had to struggle to live and hope give, we strived, we had no choice
If we were to be counted heroes of our hopeless humans
Saviours of our suppressed peoples
We had to reach a safe distance and our rural homes
To stage the war from the roots, the stems, the base!

A death in nature by nature is better than one in Dmitri dogs hands
Their deaths were inhumane, their deaths were merciless
They were mocking and shocking-laughing and loathing while killing
A mocking moustache peeking from their elongated mouths smiles
A cigar smoking from their mouth and emitting from their nostrils
A red star labeled soviet beret on their ***** irking hairy heads
They killed you slowly loving and laughing of any strength you gave to live
Until at last you are lost-in the abyss arenas of death, your are done
Such a point you give up, you can’t fight, resist anymore

They chased after us–they pursued us
They were too determined to not let any of us live
But miraculously we lived-we somehow survived
Here in this snowy arena it is a fair ground for everyone-
There is no grandmaster, it is improvisation
Survival only for the willed-fittest
Not how well you were equipped or trained
Though too skills and determination also counted

We trapped them in their own constructed coliseum
A lot of them free-froze and fell in these forgotten fields
Their bones never to reach their of-kin commemorating cemeteries
Nature is JUST! As us, theirs too had to bitterly mourn their nature lost
The never to see graves, reminders of their never returned fighting loved ones
With God’s grace on us, we cheated their beginning to tire authorities
We reached home; we reached the earth’s of our ancestors

And here we gathered to charge back-to seek backups
To restore the lost glory of our nastily punished perishing people
Some we sneaked to safety in case we all perish we have remnants
Backups to tell of us-our sorrowful story-our liberty struggles
To Kiev and its heroes; to Kiev and its strong heroines
To Kiev and its resistant living; To Kiev and its resilient
We gathered to kick back, to tell the world of the evils of the Soviet Satans
To mourn with grace our gone and done in this dehumanizing disgrace!  
O Kiev, her heartless Holodomor; O Crimea, O Georgia…..
The Satanic Soviet infiltration brought you eternal sufferings!

© Kìùra Kabiri. All rights reserved.

I could write a million words about a failed family
Tons of poetry could be composed
Describing the hurt
Telling the challenges
Explaining life growing up in an environment where the enemy is your family

This however ain't that Poetry
It's me writting about a lovely childhood
The waves of bar beach
Parents laughter with love in their eyes
Esther scared of the horses and typically every animal or insect
The burial events we organised for our rats
Shifted responsibilities in the midnight hours
Dad always making my recipe for my daily bed-wetting

The journeys to new states
Mom's baking
Mom's absence
******* movies we had access to
Mom's presence being like Santa's coming
Many starvations

The candy i asked from Dad after 1yr of separation
Dad's smile weak and tainted by sad wrinkles
The wolves in sheep clothings
How they took advantage

Karma stricking; yeah it goes round
Loosing the family again
Brutality enforced by siblings
Hatred deeply enrooted

Life's too much of a *****
Try as you may:the worst memories are ever so glaring
Being oblivious to the obvious truth: thats the escape route

To hell with forgiveness
To hell with rising above
To hell with fantasies
My demons made me fabulous.

The verdency has long been bleached from the grass.
It is now hollow straw and chaff.
It soughs and rattles it's
sorrow in whispering distress.

The livestock, ***** smudges
of skin and bone.
Stand listless, under the stick
bare branches, of the ghost gum .
Waiting for the rumble
of the feed truck to come.

The dust swirls, red fine
and irritating to skin and eyes.
The only creature to thrive
are the buzzing horde of
flies.

The bore pump clanks to life
and the water allotment
flows.
The sheep arise and drink
the trough, bone dry.
Before resettling into hungry
repose,
under the white ghost gum west of Gundagia.

This is drought, this is the
wait for rain, this is the daily
struggle, the farmers lonesome refrain.

All but the sturdiest stock
sold, shot or long gone dust,
to the unforgiving heat. Nuturing the best,
saved from starvations
questing hold.
To rebuild the farm
and complete Job's test.

After the rains have come,
all will be good again.
And if they don't come.
Doesn't matter, soon we'll
all be dead.

"Who is," I think,
"To say which of Time's seeds will stay
And what their harvests be?"

The spiteful word,
The slamming door,
The choice
To sit or flee,
To stop or have one more,
To speak cautious words or bold,
Harvests all must reap,
And each in their own time
Reveal the ends of germinations,
The husbandries of choice,
Fertilizations or starvations
Through growing seasons
Moments, Hours, Years, Centuries long;
But always harvests bountiful or spare.

Frost's Way leads on to way;
A word becomes a deed,
Born restless from a thoughtful seed.
A gesture bright with hope
Might lead to revolutions
Or end its journey on a rope.

A word of kindness, Aesop said,
Could save a lion in a net;
A mouse he'd spared
Could not forget.
Neither now
Should we.

/

[a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore]

the root of the animal’s insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.

-

when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.

-

grief is the herd my sadness trails.

-

my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.  

-

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  

-

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

-

death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.

-

trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast.

-

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

-

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.

/

[rabbit horns]

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  

-

I saw my youngest brother born.  I saw his mouth.  I thought he’d ripped.

-

the dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. my anger has gone the way of the milkman.  his doomed child with her piece of chalk.

-

it is childish how much time she thinks I have to touch everything in the store.  I am slapped so hard I am sure the mirror’s memory is for show.

-

my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower. at home, my mother puts a clean shirt on the bed and jumps from her death.

-

I am secretly happy that you’ve taken an egg for each day of your life to a doll so doll can sleep.  as your mother, I often follow a black ball of yarn into the lake of how you remember.

-

a male mime bites into a bar of soap…

-

her father is just as she imagines-

a man not making siren sounds pulled over by the man who is.

-

you will know the hoof of satan’s chosen deer by the way it glows when any female announces from the seat of a stilled tractor that she is pregnant.  you will be the age of your mother’s baby bump, older than your father’s knife, and lit by the grape in god’s mouth.

-

I am in the saddest grocery waiting with my mother for the happiest bike repair to open.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

/

[gestural transportation]

in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.  

-

I am quiet but nobody listens.

I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.

-

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly.

-

while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree.  there are egg shells on the floor of heaven.

-

the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his home in a delirium brought on by a toothache.  also, Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.

-

god goes from wall to wall unaware he is god disguised as a graffiti artist.  

renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  

-

in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.  forgiveness works alone.

-

I have never seen an attractive god.

/

[the upper body of the minotaur lost everything]

mother prays for odd things.  like passwords.  and that there be one day a mirror she can warn.  

-

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left. he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

-

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  before I can play doctor, he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  in the opening scene a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.

-

your sister is the only person on record to have been born without a gift. I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal the size of which escapes me.

-

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here. at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet and later to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

-

I know it’s early but I need you to make sure there are no bugs on your father before he goes to work.    

/

[materials (ii)]

nostalgia no longer has a church

if these are your children, I’ve lost years keeping them away from bugs

like her, I’ve never seen her starvations touch

it’s like waiting for god to donate hair

/

[materials (iii)]

I hate baseball but enjoy covering my left hand.

headache
oh pearl
of birth

/

[materials (iv)]

a painting of your whereabouts. the popcorn stoning of your first wheelchair. soft edits. pentagram. spider.

the look of a thing that wants no hands.

/

[materials (v)]

eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.

a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.

/

[materials (vi)]

she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.

/

[materials (vii)]

god twisted her ankle on a toy phone while thinking of the child you love least. mother was passing for an underwater attraction based on the inherited imagery of oblivious angels. photo credit had been done to death.

/

[materials (viii)]

an aversion to sleeping on my stomach.  needing to be alone after eating in front of people.  my father asking in the library for books on Nagasaki.  field trips to indian mounds where bullies would worship my retainer and put mud in my mouth.  my permissive mother and her essays on the grief of a social god.  not understanding how in some films there were women speaking on what was heard in the distance and how in others just men sitting around to surprise satan.  my brother threatening to run away and me showing him how my ghost would look breaking his toys.  sticks from a dogless future.    

/

[childlike boredom]

never be more creative than your abuser.

I’ll bring christ, you

canary

/

[brevities]

the voice of god is the light by which a cricket kills its ghost. grief the chosen dress of our no-show photographer.

/