From The Iliad

Vaunt Lament

To the man I have mortally wounded, as I strip him naked

Never mind your pride. Forget how you never grow too tired to fight. 

Even so. You show how you Torys shall quit the ships of the Achæans, 

by every disgrace with which you’ve ever tried to tar us described. 

Wolfbitch cowards yet you wouldn't cringe and follow Zeus, would you?

Not Zeus who punishes bad guests and one day's going to butcher your city.

When you stayed with me you took my wife, you stole such a lot of treasures,

after all she did to make you feel at home,

now you want our ships on fire and to kill us all.

Still there will come a day on which, despite your zeal for Ares,

you’ll be stopped. Oh father Zeus, you are the wisest

of every god and human, this is all your fault.

You favor them I kill, why, so boastful and bloodthirsty?

After a long spell, a person can tire of anything at all.

Of sleep, love, song, dancing, still these are things whereof 

you’d always want more than you’d want of war.

Yet they never tire of wanting more war.

After Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

ay you

stood there nude

you’re mud 

& you won’t forget

only really

you’re a foetus

of labouring dark,

on lunar milk

binging 

by this low wall

inch by inch

into full bole life

crossed over

by flowers’ dreams

& summer sleeps’

perfumes, just

to feel, believe that

from your feet

push out, race & 

worm roots,

& snakelike 

seek your deep 

& wet 

source to slake, &

& already 

bind you to it, you,

O tree alive unknown

untaxonomized

who forms the fruit

you will yourself forage

the bone of your crown

within your hair

that the wind plays with

hides a nest

of immaterial birds

and when you come to bed

and I acknowledge you

my errant brother

your touch, your breath

will awaken the flutter

of mysterious wings

right up to the edge of death

 

After Marina Tsvetaeva

like I say I’m in love with our unlovesickness,

with these feet never flitted out from under us.

how sweet to run my fool mouth, how sweet at each

accidental touch, the firelessness in my cheek.

I like that what hurts my heart is not you,

I like that what hurts your heart is not me.

that you can hook up with someone, or look at them,

and feel, at my no pain, no pain of your very own.

I love how what lives in my breast is mine,

how yours beats hardest and best within yours.

I love the word at your lips that’s not my name,

the void where no vow of ours ever flowers.

for nothing by moonlight, little by starlight, for dawns 

that draw far more than our limbs in fire, and for light I light 

solely in dreams, to you I'm unindebted, irredeemably.

for you are not, I am not, my heart’s, your heart’s, hurt. 

TO THE SURVIVORS

After Brecht's An Die Nachgeborenen.

Undeniably I live in dark days.
Any word without guile is absurd. A soft brow means
a hard heart. Anyone laughing just
hasn't heard
the new news.

And the latest, it's even
a sin to mention a tree,
since it's like this silence
about all this evil.
And whoever walks calmly across the street
retreats out of reach of their friends
who need them now.

Okay true I make a living.
Trust me that's pure fluke. Nothing
I do entitles me to eat.
The fact that I'm okay is a kind of coincidence so the first day my luck fails
I'm lost as well.

They're out here telling me: eat, drink, be thankful for what you have.
Sorry how exactly, when what I eat
is stolen from the sick
and what my water bottle pours belongs in a thirsty person's throat.
Obviously I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
We've all read good advice:
accept what you cannot change, live out your little life,
be fearless,
feel tenderness instead of violence,
turn the other cheek --
don't get disfigured by your desires.
Discover how to transfigure and forget.

I can't do that shit.
I live in dark days.