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• Metamorphoses (1…N)
• Thirty Six
• Five cities
• There and Neck Again

Something more visual.

To do /

Task for the week, month, year:
Survive this and remain a writer.
Or a poet.
Or at least a pair of glasses
And a beard,
With an affinity for culture
And an unfinished tea,
5:40 in the morning,
Watching the sun rise
From the haze
Of an accursed horizon.

@verse

Encapsulation /

If you ever dream
Of going to space –
First, come to my city
And stay for the whole
Month of May.
And forget what it’s like
To walk.
.
.
Or – forget what it’s like
To discuss new translations
Of Latin epics, or the meaning
Of words like ‘emulsion’,
Or the origins
Of inequality – or of turnips –
With anyone but your
Lovely wife.

(Whom you certainly shouldn’t
Drag onto a spaceship,
You’ve already made her live here –
And ain’t that enough?)

@verse

Sanctions Wishlist /

A Khatam box that ran from Iran,
And a book someone took
On their flight out of Russia,
One Korean-made cracker
With the likeness of Kim Jong Un,
And a bucket of tar
From a Vene-zuelan abuela.

None of these
Could be paid for
By card.

7.04/22
@verse

Finland – Dubai /

I recall the silence
Of a wooden home
On a windless day
Of a northern summer,
When the buzz of an insect
Alone strives to prove
That the outside exists –
And is barely convincing.

Not so in a tower,
Awash with construction
And cars, AC-rattled.
Its neighborly noises:
The whine of the plumbing,
The mop of a maid,
Dong, dong, donging
Against someone’s balcony
Right before your alarm at eleven,
And the chimes of the lifts,
Hauling infidel souls
That much closer to heaven.

7.04/22
@verse

Something like this would probably be playing in your head if you were to write this poem.

Saturday night, post-milonga /

My shower just got warmer,
So I know you've finished yours.
We started dancing
Fifteen years ago;
For ten of those
We have been sharing
Breakfasts, beds and stories –
Yet it is the tango
That connects us best:
You'll know your one true love
When you have faced another dozen
In an evening.

A courtship in four songs –
And onwards,
Into someone else's arms:
Fifteen embraces, fifteen
Rhythms a night, romances
Like there's no tomorrow –
And there isn't:
Just fifteen minutes,
And another lifetime ends,
And with it – all the dreams
And joys and drama
That you've conjured into being
While whirling, floating, buzzing
With the waves
Of that moth-eaten music
Which can bring you
Such
Exhilarating
Joy
When you discover pathways
Through its vintage waters,
Holding on for dear life
To your temporary love.

And then it stops.
You say goodbyes
And, leaning on each other,
Get home, take showers,
Go to bed – and know
That you will wake up
On a Sunday,
Still together.

@verse

A brief introduction to Argentine Tango
to make poems like this one accessible to more than just my tango friends

1. In Argentine tango, you don't learn steps. You learn a universal system of communication that two people can use to create a fully improvised dance tailored to any music that is playing.

2. This means you can dance with people you met for the first time – to music you've never heard before.

3. A "milonga" is a dancing event where people dance tango (in Argentina, it's also a venue where such events are regularly held). To confuse the hell out of everybody, the same name is also used for a jolly genre of music with a faster beat, which is also played in milongas – along with valses, to add some variation for the tango dancers.

4. People usually dance to tango music recorded somewhere between 1930-1970 (a smaller number of songs recorded by contemporary bands may also be used). That's a lot of very different musical styles, tempos, and moods.

5. To make it easier to adjust to your partner and the music, at a milonga, songs are arranged into "tandas" – each tanda is made up of 3-4 songs by the same orchestra from the same era. A tanda is usually 12-15 minutes long.

6. People dance the whole tanda with the same partner. When it's over, a "cortina" is played for 30-60 seconds. During the cortina, couples leave the dance floor and find new partners. Depending on the DJ's preferences, this can be any music – from jazz to pop to death metal – what's important is that it should not be confused with tango.

7. Milongas usually last between 3-5 hours. If you dance 15 tandas, you'll likely be quite tired.

8. If you were thinking of learning to dance something – learn Argentine tango and get a second life for free.

Spirit of Dubai /

An unwilling, slow
Camel of sand,
Buried deep underground,
Flat and featureless,
Fluffy like baby fur,
Cold as the night,
Dry – of such powerful
Dryness no sprinkler
Can ever defeat,
Dry like the powdered bones
Of old people
In a bag on the belt
Of a mountain climber –
Take one pinch,
And your fingers are gone,
Desiccated forever.

One day he will stand up,
And shake us all off
And move further inland,
Step after giant step,
Entombing these shallow
Parks, trees and flowers –
And all of the lipsticks
And cigarette lighters
Of concrete and glass
That we build on his skin –
In a sand pit,
To be munched shut
By water, wave after wave,
From the sea we came out of
So long, long ago –
But shouldn't have bothered
(as far as he is concerned).

30.01/22
@verse

Climate Change /

They should have taken
Better care of branding –
I'm thinking this on board
Of a November Airbus,
Taking me back
To warm Dubai
From Europe's faded green,
A semi-yearly dose
Of much more realistic
"Climate Change".

They did a good job
Getting rid of "Global Warming"
(Who wouldn't like a bit of extra warmth
In our cold lives, except the people
Stuck around the Gulf in August and July)
But "Climate Change"?
Why not the "Carbon Plague"?
Or "Climageddon",
Or "The Melting Doom",
You have to leave
some room for panic
In your naming –
If anything at all
's to be achieved.

@verse
15.11/21

Fig bonsai (an obituary) /

We came back
A few days too late
And our fig tree
Has dried.
Damn.
I’m not sure
It will bear us
Dried figs…

@verse

I made a habit of publishing small collections of poems on my birthdays, but this year's harvest is both diverse and plentiful – and we're well past July 23. While I'm figuring out which of the 60 or so scraps of verse should stay and which will go, here are a few ghosts of Christmas past from the 2021-2022 season.

(P.S. For no apparent reason, I spent most of the past year thinking I'm 37 already – so this second year of 37 will be a strange one to live in. Deja vu.)

See @verse

https://telegra.ph/Five-Cities-07-31

Spirit of Napoli /

A seagull, hard at work,
Picking apart the rotten
Carcass of a pigeon.
Do as the Romans
When in Rome –
But when in Naples,
Don’t look down.
Or up – the buildings
Of this town’s majestic past
Just make things worse
By burying the “could have been”
In “has been”.

The first graffito
(Of twelve thousand)
That I saw, arriving here by train
Read: “DEATH
TO CAMORRA”. Five days in
I can’t agree more,
Maybe even go beyond
The humble statement:
It is not the mafia alone –
The city as a whole
Seems to be asking
For another blast
From its two-headed
Mountain (in the eyes
Of a trespasser, like myself)

But people fill its streets.
They shoot about
On scooters, like so many
Plastic herrings,
Scurrying around
The sharks of its Fiats.
They sit at open tables
Of cafes on permagarbage
sidewalks, kiss on benches
Next to barricades of trash.
They walk around in miniskirts
And shorts,
Displaying godly tans –
Or beastly paunches.
(And, I suppose, by night
They tag the shutters
Of these stores.) And hark:
They SING when begging
For a coin.
And they look happy.
And they make me think
Of all that I have lost
Over the years of living
In those other cities –
Where the past is a prelude
(And not an admonition).
Where you wouldn’t think
Of washing shoes
Together with your hands,
Returning home,
Where poems don’t start
With carcasses of pigeons,
Where the dark side
Tries to hide
And where the underworld
Has less successful branding…

Standing in these streets,
I see humanity’s revolting ways
And its redeeming joys
Of feeling happy and alive
Despite whatever garbage
Gods allot you.

@verse

(In Naples, this page could pass for a cityscape.)