Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
When house lights are out,
stars enter the window frame;
the old man remains.
Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
Over the oak grove,
wild winds howl in rage,
with no leaves to blow.
Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
To breathe fresh air
a cat sits under a chair
in the pouring rain.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet of Japanese poetic forms. One of his favourite Japanese prose and haiku writers is Natsume Soseki (1867-1915), author who uses, as a common house cat, a high-register phrasing in his satirical novel “I Am a Cat”. In the nexy tennos, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) was a famed Japanese haiku master and prose writer.
~~~
Sage Master Basho
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
He got into the lotus pose upon a flat, black stool.
He felt like as he was about to toddle off to school.
He was dressed all in white from tee shirt down to socks and shoes.
Squat, in position, he felt like he’d leap into a pool/
Nearby, black suit and tie, his teacher was instructing hi,.
about the beauties of the World and Universal Gym.
He pointed out the focus that the student should be on,
against the backdrop of the orange lattice, criss-crossed brown,
Sage Master Basho, can you show me how to write haiku?
Sage Master Basho, can you teach me all that I should do?
Nobody can do that, although so many say they can.
The only one who can do that is he who’s named No Man.
~~~
Newsreel:
The murderous dictator Xi Jinping @ Davos spoke:
his message blunt, and an affront to those beneath his yoke.
He threatened there should be no war: not cold, hot, trade, or tech;
but he said n0thing of the plague. Wuhan won’t soon forget.
approximate numbers of the Wuhan flu cases: 100,000,000+, recovered 72,000,000.
The numbers indicate some things; but I don’t trust them totally.
approximate Wuhan flu deaths: World, 2,167,000.
top 20: USA, 435,000; Brazil, 218,000; India, 153,000; Mexico, 152,000; UK, 100.000; Italy, 86,000; France, 74,000; Russia, 70,000; Iran, 57,000; Spain 56,000; Germany, 54,000; Colombia, 52,000; Argentina, 47,000; South Africa, 41,000; Peru, 40,000; Poland,
35,000; Indonesia, 28,000; Ukraine, 22,000; Belgium , 20,000; Canada, 19,000.
and way down the list, in the most populated country in the World, China, 4,000.
Why? What are the reasons for these countries to have this many deaths? I would like to know. Who is looking in to this?
~~~
Every Single Nerve (on a Couch)
by Sri Wele Cebuda
He got into the lotus pose upon the poofy couch.
He leaned upon its black back, as he stretched his legs far out.
He lifted up his head and hips, as if connected by
some thread that pulled his body upward for the settled sky.
He opened up his inner eye; his mind was keen, alert.
He felt like as an active being, moving, but inert.
He looked off to the left, but not at anything at all,
not the tall lockers closed and open all along the wall.
His face in awe, there was no thing that he cared to observe.
Instead he focused on nirvana—every single nerve.
In Undulating Meditations
by Sri Wele Cebuda
He got into the lotus pose; he longed to meditate.
O, he was feeling rough around the edges. Time was late.
He got down on the white bed spread. He closed his dark brown eyes;
then opened up his inner eye out to a rugged sky.
He settled in to awesome, cosmic waves that came to him.
Though still, he felt like as he was , o, working at the gym.
He loved the movement of his mind. His thighs were spread apart.
He felt the beating, heating, sounding, pounding of his heart.
He turned his head off to the right. He felt in love with life.
He only wondered why there always had to be such strife.
Sri Wele Cebuda is a poet of meditation.
~~~
Aladdin Focus
by Secwer el Dubai
It was a magic carpet rip-pl-ing ‘neath amber skies
Its shape was square, both brown and bare, of more than ample size.
He felt like as a Flying Dutchman flying through the air—
a driver in his dream-mobile. The skies were flush and fair.
He joyed to look down on the passing beauties that he saw.
They filled him with fantastic admiration, love and awe.
He wondered how long he would go, until he had to stop.
He savoured every moment, even when he tried to pause.
But then all disappeared as quickly as it all appeared,
and he was flat upon his back in bed as k-night.s knave neared.
El Secwer Dubai is a poet of Arabia. The tale of Aladdin was actually an interpolation by French writer Antoine Galland from Syrian Maronite Hanna Diyab.
~~~
Near Stalingrad, 1942
by Rus Ciel Badeew
Who’d love a silly, gross man with an ass that he named Jew,
who passed the grassy Russian plain in 1942?
The donkey limped along; something was wrong, one hoof was bad;
but he had something to deliver to another man.
The rain was pouring on the ground, which had become pure mud.
and all the hooves had sunken in, the bad one and the good.
O, but he did not stop his plodding; he had things to do,
the man who plodded patiently along with his brown mule.
They had to reach a city of the Devil in this hell.
He had a heavy load of souls to be delivered.
Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet of Russia. Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) was a Russian writer who wrote a work on Stalingrad; but because he had a Jewish mother, when her wrote a work on Stalingrad, was told he could not use the name of Stalingrad in his title. He later wrote a short story, “The Donkey” about a trip to Stalingrad—nowhere mentioned in the story but perceptive readers read between the lines.
~~~
Andrei Platonov (1899-1951)
by Alecsei Burdeew
“You must have, like Platonov, a certain madness in yourself to get the demonic
side of communism.”
—Slavoj Žižek
Andrei Platonov was a noted writer of his day:
Intensest eyes, both fool and wise, in a flat, black beret;
big nose, big mouth, he did without, and died in poverty;
but there was more to him than that in vast eternity.
He was so primitive, ungainly, homely and home-made;
but there above broad shoulders of great strength one found his name.
And he was strange, a stranger in a strained, foreboding land,
and willing to forgo good grammar for gold in his hand.
He thought upon his head, he spoke from lips as hard as stone;
he recognized the strong desire to live upon his own.
Inside his clothes, his body was a knotty muscled mesh.
He loved the government, and longed it be renewed afresh.
He looked around the World he saw, observing it was not
how it should be, if others heed exactly what he thought.
The nasty hovered round the rush of men because it could.
He ate the day’s work every day, and found that it was good.
He longed to interweave a pan-te-o-lo-gic-al space
where everything connects to everything and is in place.
He was content with matter, but the content mattered most.
but still he loved, like Fedorov, to contemplate the ghost.
A resurrection of the dead, ideas that were real.
O, who can say Andrei Platonov didn’t trily feel?
He was the communist who made the communists seem mad.
the man whose language showed he languished in a gritty land
Alecsei Badeew is a poet of Russia. The strange phrasing and grammar are stylistic devices of Platonov’s unusual style.
~~~
In Poland: January 2021
by Ludiew E. Sarceb
“And when I look down at the crimson map,
I see the countless trains in permafrost,
and I see Frenkel, the star on his cap,
above the twenty million who were lost.”
—Leo Yankevich, “Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel”
The Polish nation wants a law to guarantee free speech;
they had it taken from them for a full half century.
The Nazis and the Communists killed millions of the Poles;
they took free speech away from them and terrorized their souls.
They want a law that says that censoring hate speech is wrong,
an evil that the nation had to live with far too long.
The Communists destroyed their land and killed their people too.
They do not want to go back to that horrid point of view.
Perhaps the Poles will be more free than we Americans.
They don’t want social media to censor…………anyone.
Ludiew E. Sarceb is a poet of Poland. LeoYankevich ( 1961-2018) was a contemporary poet who left America to live in Poland. In DC, this summer, the statue of the Polish hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko was vandalized.
~~~
A Nuit, Ennui
by Claude I. S. Weber
I saw some dude was leaning up against his bed’s head rest.
Two dudes were on the TV screen. They did not their best.
One dude was has-sel-ing the other, pushing, shoving, rough.
The other dude was grabbing back, and being just as touch.
Their punching, jabbing, scrunching grabbing was amazing, yes!
but I was even more surprised at that dude sitting there at rest.
I couldn’t figure out why he seemed bore out of his mind.
He wasn’t watching anything; yet he did not seem blind.
I thought a bit about that dude. I liked his apathy.
But then I turned back to the show, because it bothered me.
I wish that I could just ignore such monkeying around,
but that strange reservoir of boredom, o, could not be found.
Claude I. S. Weber is a poet of the new normal, the title, “To Night, Boredom”.
~~~
One Letter Change #1
by SubCIA Weedler
FBI
FIB
KIB
KGB
One Letter Change #2
by SubCIA Weedler
MSS
MIS
MI6
6I6
666
SubCIA Weesler us a poet of espionage. CIA, KGB, MI6, and MSS are security branches of the USA, CCP (Communist China), UK, and Russia. SubCIA Weedler remembers playing hundreds of one-letter-change games in his crossword puzzle books.
~~~
Twitter
by Esca Webuilder
The bluebird of unhappiness, that twits all day and night,
does not like to be seen that much, especi’lly in pure light.
It tries to hide among the bushes of the golden mean,
but it is so far off of that, it easily is seen.
It likes a boggy acre where it often can be found,
among the snakes and apple crates, it likes to fly around.
It hangs with tyrants, sycophants, and rude barbarians,
It loves to cancel kulch–ur, candor and contrarians.
Its sensors are so sensitive it censors honesty
in favour of intolerance and true duplicity.
Esca Webuilder is a poet of the Internet.
~~~
Going West
by “Wild” E. S. Bucaree
Like as a cowboy in his saddle, riding on a horse,
he got into the lotus pose to meditate on force.
He opened up his inner eye to hard, indiff’rent skies,
that didn’t care about his troubles or his agonies.
He longed to suck the pith out of his life,, although beset,
by hombres out to do him in with one more whole reset.
He felt ridiculous in this position where he was
on troubled land, beside the slam of canyon wall and dust.
In drab brown hat, he formed his OM, but could not even hum.
He could not speak of his predicament; for he was dumb.
He touched the sky he saw, but dry lips could not say a things.
He saw a flock of hawks above that circled in a ring.
The Green New Deal
by “Wild” E, S. Bucaree
“Let them eat grass and go solar.”
—Jersey Kow, to those losing their livelihoods in fossil fuels
Elites are happy they have halted the construction of
the controversial Keystone Pipeline in America.
In this recession. this destroys at least ten thousand jobs,
eleven million out of work—the crocodile chomps.
The leaders of New Mexico say this will devastate
their education programs and their economic fate;
and further north, Ute Indians say this must be withdrawn,
because it violates their rights. It’s an attack on them.
Luke Duncan, chairman of the tribe, called this short-sighted view
a violation of their self-determination too.
And in addition to Americans, Canadians
can’t pipe petroleum out from Alberta’s oil sands.
“Wild” E, S. Bucaree is a poet of the Southwest. Ironically oil from Canada will now be trucked to America, causing more environmental damage than piping it. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, who favours the reset, was upset.
~~~
The Mechanic
by Bruc “Diesel” Awe
He was a car mechanic and a Spanish-speaker too.
The whole week long he had so many jobs he had to do.
First up, he had to deal with a big-ass Nissan Rogue.
He lifted up its hood to see exactly what was wrong.
The driver said he’d had a hard jolt, rpms rose high,
when he’d been driving recently with just another guy.
He diagnosed transmission failure, needing a rebuild,
and so he went about his work; the customer not thrilled.
But it was what was needed. The mechanic did his job.
And both were quite content post trouble, tinker, wait and swab.
Bruc “Diesel” Awe is a poet of transportation.
~~~
The Killing of Jack Kennedy, 1963
by Usa W. Celebride
When JFK was killed in Dallas, many people thought,
there was a cover-up, like modern US voter fraud.
Most did not think Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him alone.
What was his motive to assassinate him on his own?
It might have been the communists who helped him with the deed;
they certainly disliked him—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
But from the book repository’s sixth floor could he make
those two shots from that angled height? or was that line a fake?
It might have been the mob, they feared the Kennedys might rule
through John’s three sons, Jack, Bobby, Teddy, till the crack of doom.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s last words were, “I am a patsy”; then
Jack Ruby, cancerous and dying, killed him in the end.
Whatever happened, Camelot was finished; it was done;
philandering with Marylin Monroe—that course had run,
the many ailments and drugs, the stress, the pain, the fear.
Remember Camelot had Lancelot and Guinevere.
Usa W. Celebride is a poet of the United States of America.
~~~
Tanka
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
From a dappled dawn,
a freckled, freckled fawn yawned
into a strong stag,
enduring and holding on
through frosty morn after morn.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet of Japanese poetic forms.
~~~
An Eyefull’s Fitting Lid
by Urbawel Cidese
Aft driving down the highway to a residential zone,
we drove down Old North to s Sonic on our way back home.
We shared a combo, Number 4, ten dollars and some change,
grilled chicken on brioche with onion rings, vanilla shake of.
We drove down streets, gray concrete, past the many stores and shops;
we drove by houses and apartments, gold slow, green, red stop.
We made our way along the city grid’s amazing maze
beneath the glaring solar disk withing a brilliant blaze.
Though it was good to go out to the places that we did,
it was good too to come back with an eyeful’s fitting lid.
Urbawel Cidese is a poet of urban spaces.
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