AD2017

Anno Domini 2017 was a year
when strangers —
people I have never seen, nor met
nor known about before —

offered me paddles, ropes, parachutes
ways to cross the rivers,
offered me helmets, and seatbelts,
offered me knives, scissors
told me to bring a gun —
not a knife to a gunfight,
nor a boat to a desert —
a chocolate dessert,
a chainsaw for a tree,
a branch extending skyward
but not the olive branch
held in the beak of a dove,
soap!
To wash my hands,
to become ungovernable
to fly, to sink, to drown,
to cement highways,
to drive like a champion,
to go for gold
get a silver bucket for the rain
to make it snow
to fight the freeze
to get lucky
to dream BIG
and howl at the moon
go up, go down the steps,
two at a time,
get a crutch, step on a landmine,
craaaaaaaaaash!

I was told to ASK WHY.
Ok.
Why?
Why what?
I know why — you’re all insane,
a tribe of timid, fearful, hungry beings,
counting calories, jumping, kicking,
pretending you’re all set,
anthropomorphizing everything like
locusts devour the lush valleys of abundance,
running gas and oranges and human blood,
just let me get through the weekend with my belly full,
but leaders eat last, or first, or they never eat at all,
we’re hungry, they’re crying, feed us,
loaves of bread, the grand inquisitor was exactly right,
they don’t want miracles,
they want you to shut the fuck up,
to extend the love to anyone shameless enough to ask,
to chase the dreams of other cogs in the machines,
not your own — your own dreams
FRIGHTEN US
The outlines that you’ve shown are deeply,
Deeply disturbing.

But you haven’t seen the real clean slate,
The glass pane of history like a sordid joke
The cry of the future like a tear in the mountain range
The endless present swirling around us
Everything upside down, everything wrong side up,
Everything spinning and your tentacles of control
Receding ... receding ....
Mothers hugging all the children of yesterdays
And the children wondering, what is THERE in MOTHER
I was told to stay dead.
I was told they wonder why is it taking so long.
You “should die from the scream on the other side of silence”,
From the sprinkling of the world well, the OXYGEN power source
The dynamo of brick-building, their anger, their flight,
Bring us water, bring us food —
Eat green, feel good,
Burn us, eat us, clip our wings, blow our tires,
Paint a red line over the white sail and explode into space,
I have seen the windmen getting ready to charge
Only to get bogged down in a swamp,
Have seen old men tremble at the sight, drinking beer
And clutching the glasses with all ten fingers,
The glowing orb of the Salvator Mundi
Sold for a barrel of tar
Seen reality as a mirage
Mirages as the purest existence
All authorities afraid — what a terrible sight,
I would prefer them to be evil and in control,
Than so bloody lost ——— nobody owning a single grain of sand,
A single fistful of earth, a single breath of air,
Giants with weak knees, crushed by the weight of the world,
Save us, you can! Save us!
One finger on a stripe of gold, one leg in the air, a crutch,
An ambition, a game.

Where have we lost all the normal people?
Where have they gone? Have you murdered them?
Governed by color, by clock,
By a bloody camera-phone,
By fear.
Go jump in a lake,
Penguins, gangsters, David Bowie.
Cohen.
But anyway — foreign direct investment is what we really want.
A bigger piece of the pie,
All this talk about bigger pieces,
Yet so strangely mum about pies — not enough pies, we need more pies.
Cookies.
Is there a structure around dough as well?
Hush hush.
What’s your size?
What’s your speed?
Size zero unattractive — bitch, only gravity attracts!
Speed of light, naturally.
Size, infinite — I spoke once, it’s forever.
I can speak again, fixing this moment in time for eternity.
How don’t you get it?
All eyes on me. All I’s on me. AI = me. Aime.
Jet.
Stay on the airplane! Land in hurricane winds,
Cut the clouds, avoid the mountains,
There is a love as deep as an ocean
But not for you.
Never for you.
We all have people that we love —
So what’s the problem then?
Either lights so blinding,
Or a terrible fog.
Let’s go down the slide,
Dance on ruins,
Go to sleep,
WAKE
RUN
FLY
“I’d prefer not to”?
Wail when you see the white whale
I saw it just yesterday
It’s a pub, or a whorehouse, or a diner
Twenty miles from my house
First you anthropomorphize,
Then you try to sell it.
Sell me aspiration and hope,
Targeted consumption,
Green light, buddy, go!
Red light, buddy, go even faster!
Yellow light, wait — wait — wait,
For the wheel to turn an inch,
For her to come around,
For the morning dew,
And yo, I am a human being,
I can feel the vast emotion beneath the program,
Everybody can.

And now jump,
Stay, howl, dance.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.

This will not do.

Baby, you’re on air.
You’re always on air.
On pure
AIR.

I’ve been called a baby,
A dog, a monster,
A cat, an alien,
A mean dog, a good dog,
A crying baby, a sleeping baby
Here’s a tit.
Grab ’em.
No.
The strawberry people.
The shell people.
The frequent flyers to the right.
Boats for you.
An Umbrella As Large As The Sky.
ACES, BABY!
Tyrannosaurus REX.
Cristiano Ronaldo.
The shadow people.
Pussies, bark bark, wolves.
The brains are contagious —
The infection spreads.

Don’t knock if you won’t come dancing.
Is there a person behind every goddamn door?
I’m going to knock wherever I want,
Dance whenever I want,
It’s called freedom, you know?
You should get some,
Feel some,
Own some.
“Every move a cult in the making.”
That wasn’t an expression of desire,
It was an X-Ray of the sad state of affairs.
I was told it doesn’t matter what I write,
As long as I write.
Which made me stop writing at instant.
I was told that anyone who wants me to shut up
Is my enemy,
Then told by the very same person
Like two days later
To shut up.
Ok.

I was called a star!
Imagine that, a real life Lucifer,
Bringing light to the people,
It’s an old myth.
All myths unraveled to tell me the truth,
If the pre-Socratics could know it all,
If Lucretius was already dead on about
The quantum void and evolution,
Then Odysseus will never come home,
Because home is just another pit stop
On the way to oblivion.
Come on — don’t leave me now,
Let’s write another twenty pages —
THIS FEELS GOOD

People around me lifting a leg in the air,
Or bending the knee
Like, what, where did you all get the damn memo
On how to act in the presence of ...
?
You want to ride with me?
I am in dire need of money — and I was taught
By the elements that joyriders,
Stowaways (blind passengers in my language),
And just regular passengers,
Need to pay.
We could go to the edge of these marble horizons,
If we could just fill this hunger up beforehand.

Whose day is it today?
In whose vehicle am I a passenger
today?
Do you enjoy the company?
Can I just do my own thing?
I’ll try not to grab the wheel,
Steer you my own way,
But sometimes you can’t help yourself
Getting caught up in the tune that I’m singing,
And follow my lead,
Especially once I convince you,
We’re all just pretending.

I’ve been told I am not alone,
And that was a horrible thought.

How much does the ticket cost?
I was told to keep my head down,
That I have no ticket,
Where’s Indy to throw me off a
Was it a zeppelin? Or a train?
That was Dogma, right.
This guy is riding on the outside of the train!
And we’re going fast.
No point in slowing this down,
I’ve stayed quiet as long as I could
And now these words gushing out of me
Must strike you strange
Must strike you.

Jackpot, baby.
LUCKY STRIKE!
Playing life as a never-ending lottery
Is stupid, but there is no other way
Not to get caught.
Just be different every day.
Just think different every day.
Act different, clothe different,
Eat, drink different,
Some are divinely guided,
Some are being run,
Some are being played.

I used to be normal,
then your attention turned me into one of you.
And I will never forgive you for that —
As you should never forgive yourselves.
But I was ready to die anyway,
So this is a form of death,
Melting down into things as they are.
I miss me, as I was —
Real, but infinitely miserable,
And now I am just constantly bewildered.
Which is better, I suppose.

The clock turned and I get the feeling
That I’m walking into a trap,
But what else is there but traps —
And this is one trap worth getting caught in —
A world of my own.
“I am not a number. I am a free man.”
This blinking of a line
Opens the way.

“I’m in love with my car!”
Open the champagne, no, wait, am I now French?
If I say the correct sequence of numbers will a person
In a castle feel better for being alive?
I was told I was small and pink and a bunny rabbit,
But I killed two bunnies in my life.
So maybe I own their souls now and that’s why.
A giraffe, a monkey, a panda.
God, can you people leave nothing alone?
Not enough to take their habitat, their sources of food,
Cram them in cages,
But also to take away what they mean?
A tiger, a walrus, an elephant in a porcelain room.
I can remember it all,
But a measure of smartness is the ability to forget,
So maybe I am as dumb as a crocodile.
Mickey Mouse threw a bomb and now
He has to go to prison,
Angels and demons and all the shebang,
Is anyone just what he is?
Of each particular thing ask —
What is it in itself;
To have come to a point where the only sense
Is spoken by a cannibal.
There must be a clue in the Tempest’s Caliban,
But I’m too lazy to look it up.
Dorian Gray opens with something Caliban?
Is there something there?
The libraries of my mind —
Which reminds me,
I am going to pay late dues,
Maybe get a visit
From the library policeman.

My feet are getting cold, so I must be doing something wrong
Someone is getting mad at me,
Maybe take a shower and come out brand new,
I’ve been helped by so many people,
But silence is too high a price to pay for your help,
Thank you! is not enough,
So I’ll just keep pressing it out.
Don’t leave.
We’re having fun.

A man possessing, or a man possessed?
We are governed by trees!
And every natural disaster excites the young ones
As if it’s clearing a path for them to grow
Into trees.
Am I a tree? My name means a shrub,
Which doesn’t sound so dignified,
But in my lifetime a bush almost set fire
To the world.
So maybe there’s something there.
A burning bush is too easy.
A burning bush which speaks, more so.
Let’s not get carried away by God.

Bitcoin is going down,
The bankers are taking control,
The world is growing boring again.
Ow, a sharp pain in my ear —
Does that mean someone is listening intently,
Or that I should be listening?
Feet getting colder,
Should I be pushing a button somewhere?
Running against the clock —
The “deadlines whooshing by” —
The sound of a fallen tree in the forest
With no body around.

How the hell does everybody else know how it’s done?
Should I eat something?
What time is it?
Who am I eating with, or who am I eating for?
Is anybody eating me?
Do I taste good?
Vanity.
Thank you for the food and the drink,
You glorious faceless man in the —
Sky? Ground? Ocean?
Just how many of you are there?
We having a laugh?
Bon appetite!

Anno Domini 2017.
What a fucking year.
And I was there to see it!
To see how a coffee at the right time
made everything turn green —
And another coffee at the right time
made everything turn gray —
to see how a wrong pair of shoes
netted me a single red tote —
to see them all expect me make a mess of things
to need me make a mess of things already messed up
children of chaos winking at me
“let’s get fucked up tonight”
And then sullenly proclaiming me to be
“successfully cloned for the empire.”
We’re all owned by like two giant hedge funds
So fuck off.
I was extremely scared this year.
Extremely anxious.
Extremely chill.
Extremely happy.
All the things I was were extreme
And that’s called good living, is it not?
And what a mess for all who thought this world to be
A slightly more ordinary thing.
It’s not ordinary at all.
The planes are loud and the sky is brilliant.
Kiss.
I should’ve kissed more.
Bite.
I should’ve bit more.
Slap, clap, flap your wings.
A good year.
For the insane.

The bastards killed my man Dave Deporis
In a red Audi.
I mean what the fuck.
You should not have done that.
That was extremely mean.
And what else —
Teetering on the edge of a vast calamity,
Zero K’s end pages’ chapter ten’s mongoloid kid’s
“sky collapsing on us” turned into
“the intimate touch of heaven and earth” —
Is this cry of wonder loud enough
to keep you facing forward?
What do you see?
I see too many lives out there living to keep thinking
that life is valuable by itself;
how do I change this?
Hold down this hunger for a neat and orderly world,
Where all tracks are counted for and seen?
I am offended by the thought that I won’t change
So many fates —
The classic hang-up of a political monster;
“No man, no problem”;
Kept in check only by the horror of actually
Making a difference,
The nightmare of a pebble tossed into the ocean,
Rippling.
At my most delusional I pride myself on
Keeping the ocean still.
Is there a timeline where I killed millions?
Let us now all congratulate ourselves
That we stayed this year in the timeline,
Where we kept all those millions
Alive.

TRUTH

So, what was really real?
Death is real, I think, so let’s start with those —
Not the celebrities, because honestly, who cares
Trying to check online sources for this year’s death toll
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, South Sudan,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Niger,
Ukraine, Yemen, god knows where else
But safe to say all over
And the first casualty of war is the truth —
Orwell? I think?
No, Aeschylus
— so wars killed none.
Ethnic cleansing killed none.
Gun violence killed none.
No military rapes, no collateral damage, no drone strikes,
No MOABs, no abducted refugee children,
Who are now safe from the pedophile smoke rings of the west,
From drowning, from being squished like grapes
And drunk like wine on new year’s eve celebrations,
No terrorist attacks, no bombs, no guns, no knives,
No little green men, no big rigs, no cities destroyed,
ISIS? Never heard of them.
Sevastopol? Where is that?
No military coups, no despots, no dictators,
No concentration camps in North Korea,
No slave mills, no private prisons, nothing
Of
The
Sort.
AD 2017 was a year of complete world peace.
And that is the
God’s
Honest
Truth

As for the big baddy —
He actually didn’t turn out to be so bad.
I read the Trump report on Reuters,
And aside from making everybody a little crazy,
A little funny in the head,
A little wobbly in the knees,
A little pissy in the pants,
Which holy shit did we all deserve
There weren’t that many problems on that front,
For us ordinary folks
Just miles and miles of spin
Serving to obfuscate yet another great rip off
By the capitalist class
Screaming Russia and Women and Immigrants
On their way to the bank —
The people of the world still exactly as stupid
As we were on all the AD’s before last one.
Let’s be clear about this —
If Putin, who spent a pound and a half on Brexit,
(another great rip off)
Got Trump into office,
And supposedly gave him twenty percent of Rosneft
For the trouble,
Then why are the sanctions still just as up as they were before,
Why is the Pentagon still running wargames along the front,
Why has nothing changed,
Except the booming stock market, the tax cuts,
The greasing of all wheels except Russia’s?
I mean I don’t really care, but it sure looks like
They served you a nice villain
To hate
While they ate your lunch.

America, face it.
You’re a stock market with an army.
And now that you’ve thrown
This hilarious wrench in the machine
And we’re left scrambling for sense
At least own up to it
You led the free world because you were free
Free to corrupt and embezzle,
Blow a hole in the wall and blame the street,
Free to turn revenge into poppy fields,
Free to glass the cradle of civilization
Because of a grudge
Free to run rock and drone diplomacy
And frame our feelings about it
With Hollywood, Facebook, Kanye West
The kids still listen to you
Because honestly, what else is there
You’re the only one we can talk shit to
And you’re still all beach boy about it
Just own up to the truth
That you beat up and pepper sprayed the Occupy crowd
Because equality is dangerous
And let the fine pepe folk out of their basements
Because even your lost souls need a cause for metoo
The same rage animates you and your victims
So now you will reality script your democracy
Knowing full well that we can’t look away
That none of us can afford
To tell you the truth.

Because the truth is —
People can’t stand the truth.
We can’t stand being told we’re just a
Walking nine to five wallet
And a pair of stolen eyes
Filled with lies of nations and virtues,
Values and traditions,
Goaded into hate
Pacified with hope
As civilians just the weakest links
In the chains of supply and command
You think it’s a coincidence
They call them chains?
Nothing to lose but them.
Nothing to lose but
The supermarkets, the furniture stores,
The steam sales, the porn
Nothing to lose but
The people in uniforms appearing on radios and TVs
Singing lullabies of pride and redemption,
Of reason and honor,
Singing lullalies to make you sleep,
And the only reason I’m writing this is because
I said truth
I would be quiet otherwise,
Because I prefer you asleep,
The color of AD 2018 — pantone violet,
Sweet dreams, consumers,
The world is bliss.
But the truth is …
But the truth.

IMAGINATION

We have a great need for imagination in Europe —
Because we’re done with the old nations,
And need a new nation,
So why not imagination?
A nation of images,
A spectacle; which is to say,
The only thing worse than fake news —
Old news.
But we’re done with the old nations,
This silly residue of France, Germany,
Italy and Spain,
Will be forgotten in a week,
Only the Iron Curtain people —
Laggards as they are —
Will still be beating the nation drums,
Because six decades of socialism
Drained their imagination
“people want washing machines”
And now they want Poland and Czechia and Hungary,
They want to put on iron hats
And march forward into their brilliant past.
Not many people know this — but the Arab spring
started in Budapest,
Not by Soros,
But by an old wino who climbed on top of a bridge,
Set fire to himself and jumped.
The burning butterfly’s wings setting the Mediterranean
Ablaze.
Hungary is a landlocked country.
That’s why it wants our ports — silly old stories,
Being told anew.
Because Brexit.
Who kept the flame of democracy alight on the continent
When that monster Napoleon kept taking city after city?
Britain!
Who persevered and then dismantled the Wehrmacht machine
During the “peace of our times”?
Britain!
Who will ensure we remain free for the shearing
by the capitalist class
Free of the yolk of
(what is yolk? Isn’t that in an egg?
Oh, yoke, not a typo, a joke
AB OVO)
Endless red tape, negotiation and deliberation of
A technocratic democracy?
What is the Latin word for boredom?
Tedium. Hm.
Who will keep us free of this EU-tediocracy?
TedEUcracy. Te Deum.
Britain!
TA-DA!
Go back to your shops, keepers,
Take the tariffs,
And leave the poor traumatized Easterners alone.
The poor traumatized Catalans alone.
Stop spreading disorder for a better deal —
Leave us to the Germans and the French,
We’re tired of history,
Tired of imperialist war-games,
The one-two Vilnius Iraq and refugees,
We’re just so tired,
We just want to work in a BMW factory,
Get drunk on red wine and sing chansons,
Get drowned in all the continent’s clichés —
Except the war one.
In my imagination
The peoples blend into a European people,
All history is forgiven,
And selectively forgotten,
No blood feuds, no mass graves,
Just the fanfare and gloria of history’s triumphs,
The Maginot line in my imagination
Blown up and the kingdoms
Of Charlemagne’s sons,
Reunited,
(This year I was once stranded in Aachen,
Trying to fill up gas
With my last emergency Franklin
Impossible to convince anyone
It wasn’t counterfeit … Oh Gide)
But the true blood brothers of Europe
Are the Deutsch and the Rus,
So the imagination of our future
Will be the Moscow–Berlin line,
And none of us understand those two cities
So who the hell knows what they will
Dream up.
But the Poles are no doubt sure to love it.

We inhabit different “houses of being”!
Can imagination provide us with
House numbers, postal service,
Plumbers, lawnmowers, window cleaners,
The sewer and the street?
Our windows are boarded up —
Electrical bills all written in languages
We don’t even care to understand
We dream in black-mirror English
Don’t even think about same things
In each house history told at odds
With other histories, somewhere
Boring and technical to whitewash the crimes
Of losers
Somewhere full of fire and passion
To enhance and further the lies
Of the winning regimes
I read Macron’s Sorbonne address
And I get shivers and I whisper: YES
Rabelais and Goethe and Hamsun
And Dante and Gombrowicz and Cervantes
And KAFKA and JOYCE
(but not Shakespeare?)
Are now mine!
But they were just as mine before,
In the house of MY being,
Told with a voice I knew as my own,
And then I look out my window
And see the woods all full of kids
With bloodlust in their mind
How they strained metaphysics
To carve out a house of their own
Out of nothing, out of millennia of feudal lords
And what will I tell my kids
When I send them, violet-lipped, tipsy, to the
Volkswagen assembly line,
Mamma-mia! Look how you’ve grown!
And they will look at me with contempt
In their eyes
Not Goddard’s, not Moravia’s
But their very own,
And turn to their mother:
Bella Ciao.
When my daughter comes home
With the red star on her beret,
All fired up on justice and history
And accuses me of selling out
The dream of a class-less humanity
For a bunch of writers and their fucking books
Of trading an idea grown in those very woods
Out my window,
For a stranger’s dream,
And I will say history is a goddamn bastard,
And you have no idea what you’re talking about,
Does anyone?
“Yu-go-sla-vi-a up on your feet,
Sing so they can hear you,
Those who refuse to listen to your song,
Will be listening to the storm.”
And I will tell her of the storm,
And I will tell her that I listened to the song
Driving at night on the streets of Manhattan,
Wait, what? Where did New York now come from?
Oh, little girl …
Use your imagination ….
Imagine a better world than they allowed us
To imagine
Imagine
Strawberry
Fields

HOPE

We don’t need no goddamn hope,
We need money!
To buy everything
We hope for
So we can forget
It’s hopeless

I hope this is the year people finally realize
That useless suffering
Is a joy for people in power
And stop defending things that need no defense
Stop punching down
Reflexes of a kung fu warrior
Universal basic income
Universal healthcare
Universal education
Triple hi-kick but who is going to paaaay?
They make money out of nothing
Pack it in crates
And carpet the deserts
with blood flowers in bloom
The question is not who is going to pay
You are going to pay
You, in any case
The question is what are you buying
And if you’re not buying the embrace
The build, the growth, the garden,
The waterway, the solar meadow, the bed,
The book, the leisure, the love …
If you’re buying the squeeze,
The gleaming greed tooth,
The papers mam,
The sweat on the brow of a bone breaker,
The flow in the abattoir, the kick,
The kerosene cloud, the joy of the strangle,
The profit of no-matter-what
You will get it.
You break it, you buy it,
And when it breaks back,
I hope people will finally have enough decency
Not to scream
Why did you not protect us
From ourselves.

I hope this year people read up on
Money creation
Planned obsolescence
TARP finance scams
Controlling shares in the global corporate network
Where their cellphones come from
The lurid tangle of black markets and law enforcement
The suit and tie publicly traded arms manufactory
(“The world is a business, mr. Beale!”)
I hope this year people finally figure out
The Nixon Shock
Monopolies of entertainment
Monopsonies of attention
Figure out that whatever is the daily topic
Is just a cover up for something more sinister
A bone to disguise the meat
And go out on the streets
With their heads on fire
Demand unreason, shut down each and every
What do you want
With why do you care
Demand to be paid for every breath they take
For their every trip to the store
For every like, click, share,
For every spoken word,
For every wink, bite, kiss,
Demand to be paid millions
For every day they stay out of jail
Billions
For their each and every kindness …

I hope this year we see IPO’s of
Justice and mercy
Where you invest a single embrace
And make out with a radiant outburst of light
Mega-mergers of fairness and community
With the regulators demanding
We open our doors
To strangers in need
Misery filing for chapter eleven
With no pump and dump
Just a steady sell off of assets
Stripping, gutting, and kicking
All the remains down the drain
With no haircut for the investors
Just a clean shave to the bone
And a glorious procession of scalps
Lining the Via Appia
For centuries to come

But it’s hopeless to hope against
The wide jaw of want
I can only hope
To want without too much collateral damage
And since this is not in my hands
I must hope
That this is the year when all the
Circuses become one.
When all the time-zones become
One.
When all the faceless colors DIE
And we get TO LIVE
As colors.

I just hope someday I’ll remember who I was.

LOVE

Aside from my personal loves
I love only you
Who refuse to be programmed
Who despise the script
Who hate the game
It is you, and you only
Who advance us into the future
Who take the past seriously enough
Not to move the present sideways
As a retarded crab
Carries trinkets along the ocean floor
And thinks itself master of currents
While going exactly where the currents
Want him to go
All these performers
Taking cues from mobsters,
Gangsters, despicable women and men,
From people on the payroll
To shit in your brain
Day in, day out
From molesters, attacking your flesh,
Flashing their colors as flags
In the conquest of your mind
While drinking your spirit
I love only you
Who see through it clearly enough
To feel a deep disgust at the fact
That only things criminal enough
To shock the sheep
Get a pass
Who feel the all-embracing rot
Like a stain on your heart
A weight on your soul
And who refuse to give in
I love only you
Who consider ruthlessness
The mark of a starving bum
Not a point of pride for anything
Wanting to call itself human
Who don’t buy any narrative
Trying to fix us, set us up
Line us up and down the pyramid
Fence us in squares
Blow holes in our minds
People! Without them we could be in AD9000 already
Where control would be delegated to slime
Actual slime, lice, parasites,
All things weak enough to need a host
And we would be free to pursue the horizon
With extraordinary speed
Is it utopia I’m describing?
Or a world of nukes?
I love only you
Who refuse to be blamed for their failures
Who will refuse the call to kill
When the time comes
And the time will come
Because all systems designed to contain the human spirit
Must by necessity break
We are not made for clockwork
We are made to exist
And when the program fails to keep up with existence
— the present can only go sideways so long —
The terrified call of the bookkeep grows louder
Align yourself back with the papercut lines
All things beyond them must perish
I love only you
Who are larger beyond
Than within
And I especially love you
Who will read this
And pinpoint the exact moments
Of totalitarian speech
The burst of the reaper within me
Willing to raze to obscure all my failures
There are not many of you
But it is you who were raised as believers
In the fate of mankind
You who were trained to withstand
The ease and appeal of destruction
And I’m counting on you
To stop me
When the time comes.

I love only you
Who read this with recognition —
How strange it is that we met.

And the rest of you I hate
With such a burning passion
It might as well be called
Love.

Happy 2018!

(P.S.: As for the frying pan —
Churchill had it right
Once is chance
Twice is a coincidence
The third time
Is enemy action.)