Walls

(By Gub, Berlin)

The light that breaks
Clouded shapes
Graffiti falls
On slabbed
Walls

Charts
Defeat of
Segregated
Beats
Between the rising
And the setting
Of the sun
On Europe's
Tidal boundary
The bulkhead broken
History frozen

Feet on the pavement
Roll on

Wish

(By Gub)

My one wish is this:
That my world was whole,
Undivided by war, by this schism
Between our halves

You speak of love
You mother my child
You are precious
Yes - but also untamed
And wild.

Will we capture the unbridled
Force that drives us apart ?
Will we break it's power or is it
Part of us ?

The effects are corrosive
Un-redeeming, bereft of love
Blasé, reductive -- half-witted.
Yet - they consume the moment,
The hour, the evening.

I feel lost unseated -
Is the chapter turned
The book unbound?
Are we finished together and
Lifetimes continue, unfound

Chimeric Barbecue

(New Year's Eve, Olympos, Turkey)

Strangers of history
Offer mushrooms
Fried
On the Eternal Flame
Violins whine
Poets beat their chests
In empty rooms
Wailing "Ubi sunt"
Where are they
Wrestlers, benefactors
Harbour prostitutes
Amphitheatre actors
Jesting, meddling gods
Pines bowling over the ruins
So much mince to re-claim
At the scattering hands
Of the Mad Harvester
Oranges rot in the river

Pomegranates
Swell
And burst in the rain

Caprice

(By Gub, December, HBC)

A flower in love
A scorpion in a storm
Reason has no charm
Logic's a thorn

Don't bribe my heart

With platitudes
Of age's imbecile
Progress
From needy child
To manly tears

I don't want capricious
Caresses
But the impossible
Promise
Of unending
Summer
Of nectar
With no recess

The Speaker

(By Gub, November, HBC)

His voice
Volleys
Around the room
A volatile
Timpani of
Words
Ricochet
Off the walls,
Bounce
And then
Fall flat
Empty and
Volume-less.

Bubbles, popped,
By contact with hard
Materials -
Matter over mind

What matter?
Mind over matter?
Oh never mind.

The Turk

(By Gub, Turkey)

A cacophony
Accords:
The story of rupture,
Of velveted war, of a much perfumed
Overlord.

The turkiman - the crescent star
Surlyman,

Balkan baron, 

Islamic raider
Of Byzantine empire.

Sufi, 

Dervish, 

devilish dance
The swirling unctions of massaging chance.

Three centuries of Osman's tree
Constantinople falls, 

Vienna in the harem
Of Sardinapolis' branch.

Europe curses the opulence of Asia's
Gate - the thrusting forward of this mystic
Eastern state.

Top kapi's
Palace
Sherbet dream
Istanbul - miasma of cultures
Corporal and spiritual haven
Reigns
Supreme.

The Turk
May endure decline
Yet, the cultural layer cake
Of his chosen planet
Remains spiced
By five centuries
Of the sublime.

Patara, Incomplete

( Turkey)

Full-baked illusion
Unravels in the jaws of the amphitheatre,
Washed-out bath floors,
The orkestra
Life chasing
Life
Amongst the colonnades
Clean lines
Reflected sideways
In unclean waters
How diminished a civilisation
That can no longer speak
Its own name

Women worship
The fruit of new seeds
What time has yet to steal
Lies scattered in an open field
Inventory of a broken world
Pieces inane
Outlines guessed,
Numbered
Incomplete

Lost Gods

(By Gub, Turkey)

Turkey astounds me
Mouths exploding with smoke
Lungs with courteous rhetoric
Landscapes bathed with ruined basilicas
Statues. Seascapes. Purple history
Greek, Roman, polygamous ottomans
Sensual kingdoms of texture, architecture, attire
And polymorphous deities - more gods than time to praise.

Surely the green, blue, grey eyes,
The cosmos rolling millennia into a granite ball
Has hurled its last from the Anatolian peninsular ?

What use for Olympians in the bubbled cellophane of
Tesco's fruit cultivation ?
And Heracles outside of the garden centre statuette ?

Man has sunk his gods
And with them, the deity of his nature.
He is bereft of soul
That vessel which one birthed
Whole cultures, civilisations
Is stranded
Locked into an iPod
An email
A tweet
His cosmos is software
Gods are apps
Constellations once stars in the heavens
Are contacts on Facebook
No longer lights to guide a ship by
But GPS signals - the dying of providence,
Of fate and faith in profane love

The ascent
Of man

More compassion
Less violence
And poverty
Maybe -
But in our souls we are bleeding
For civilisations weren't for the deification
Of man's right to survive at the expense of everything.

There were also admissions of humility, of limitations, of acceptances
The transient holiness of spirit breaking through generations and
histories
Until now they endured - absolute belief that all deities were greater
than we - that God was the greatest of all

The deities are all dead - 

God may survive but only in fanatical pathology
We are alone with our virtual kingdoms

our viral universe

our tiresome language of branding all worlds the same.

All worlds end: stars explode/implode, 

the rhythm of solar systems
still governed by unknown principles.

One day we may exploit the truth - but precedent shows only one constant.
Man never gets one over on the future.

Labyrinth

(By Gub, Turkey)

We float diaphanous
pillars of salt on a rising tide.
Wounded bleeds
Inflict torturous
Love

The battle to live
To die
Surrenders to the
Abyss
In which fear lies
Down with the ashes
Of wasted days

The dirt and the hunger
Of praise meanly passed-up,
soft words not whispered
Caresses withdrawn
Kisses unlaid.

Such feelings are children
Un-childrened

Averting the sentry's gaze
We pass by the colosseum
Orpheus,
The first Orphan,
Sees us wander
Recognises earth's
Loss - as we enter the underworld.

The land of the living lifeless
Man's god gotten selfish maze.