The Creative Act

When I sit alone and write
I sometimes look out on the night
It isn’t often that I write
By day, I just can’t stand the light

I write at night and watch the moon

I wonder if I’ll see it soon.

Three attacks in Kabul

Three attacks in Kabul show
What harder men than us do know
What Alexander could not take
Whose prison Russia could not make
Such earth, such as it is, is all
A stage cast through with war’s grim pall
Through time from when we had but fire
One after another, each empire
That tried to take it, fought in vain
Another legion of soldiers slain
But still the struggle rages on
For what is right and what is wrong
And as they strike against the very
Prisons, fellow warriors tarry
And kneel upon the blood soaked ground
Though ‘cause no hope for peace is found
They pray for courage and skill and luck
Then don their vests and run amuck
Kalashnikovs they took from Reds
Are making western soldier’s beds
Their coffins always sent back home
Their spirits never free to roam
The land that they would die for just
To fail completely to impress
Upon their foe the need for change
Dictatated needs to rearrange
Priorities and government
Make sure the money is well spent
For goodness sake, we’ve heard the tune
Lets hope we learn our lesson soon

A blank page?

Senses! Engage!

Defy the whiteness of this alien fiber,
I have not seen it until now.

I launch a careful offensive,
To revert, reclaim, and liberate… A row.

Battles of Ink and turgid Wood,
Complex and chemical skirmishes
Turn marks mechanically upon the page.

The motions of my mind are that, and more.
At once freer and more hampered than the grind
If pen on materiality, not by linearity,

But mutually assured is the obfuscation that falls
(flowing) from my peace.

And through it all I managed to become
The monstrous great unhuman that you sought,
To bolster the excuse which led you to
Abandon all of that which we had wrought,
And in my hour of victory you found
Within yourself, you claim, a grain of salt
Which poisoned then, forevermore, the ground:
The fount that, drinking, seemed to make life count.

If one can struggle idly or till the field asleep
It seems that this is the engagement
Which the masses most often tend to keep

They toil long, their hours with work are rife
Bent backed and doubled over through the night
But is their work their aim? Is it their very life?

Such a totality of devotion, so it seems
Would leave so little in the space between
Their start and end, their beings cloth reduced to seams

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Fascile idiots know better than I

Their ruttering verbal pour
Effects meaning clearer for
The targets of their useless jive
The ‘say’ and meaninglessly ‘saying’
Said that nothing’s meaning’s sought.

I seek clarity in brazen words
And graphite stick but no
Closer do I come to truths fealty
Since no person to my poetry
Can take sooth.

I write for no one but myself
And introspective thought can not
Provide for and but the most
Single minded of dialogues,
Much like those with which most idiots contend.

In saying, ‘sayings’ said are sought by seekers seeking sound of thought to hear and having heard consider what sounds such seeking sods had better send to thither thinking thoughts.

Regarding your editorial, “A Terrible Shame”, page B6 of the Saturday Observer of Jan 10th, 2009.

Dear Sirs,

Your editorial “A Terrible Shame” reads well but seems to tell only one side of the story, despite extending a literary olive branch to Arabic culture. You neglect to mention that the Arabs too were dispossessed, when the lion’s share of Palestine was ‘given’ to the Jews by the British for the creation of a Jewish state, despite its predominantly Arabic demography. Also, I dispute your unsupported claim that Israel, “as a western society (…) has always expected that peace will be achieved through negotiation and compromise.” Israeli policy surely refutes this statement if you consider; their blockade of Gaza (a de facto act of war), the dividing walls nearing completion in the West Bank, or the military strikes they routinely carry out against anxious neighbors with F-16 fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships. The record of ‘western societies’ in seeking peaceful resolutions includes the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Iraq wars. Perhaps you understand these events as examples of ‘negotiation and compromise’. What I (and Red Cross, and Medicines Sans Frontiers) see compromised in the Gaza Strip is innocent human life, the significance of which does not seem to rank well against the all-important rocket attacks on whose account, apparently, the civilians of Gaza may blame themselves for their casualties.

Sincerely, Benjamin J. Oomen B.A. Liberal Arts

229 Argyle Ave. Apt 1106
Ottawa, ON. K2P 2J1

Home: 613 234 9203
Cell: 613 883 1385

P.S. Although I would love to see this in print, I do not really expect it to be published. That is because newspapers and other media outlets in our ‘western society’ seem to consider it taboo to consider seriously any guilt or wrongdoing on the part of the state of Israel. One has only to recall how Michael Ignatieff was lambasted for days after merely suggesting that Lebanon AND Israel were both guilty or war crimes. A suggestion which has proved, of course, to be true. Anti-semitism is no good, but it is possible to take Zionism to far.

This is an older piece of mine that I uncovered today while transcribing my extant poetry into digital anthology. Hope you like it.

________________________

Let us fill our tiny lives
With patterns of humanity
Intricate relationships and
Relational intricacies

Fervency in our friendships
And the ardency of a zealot
In our constant search for
Clarity and peace of mind

We’ll find the time
To spare the time
To be on time
For our time
When its time it’s nothing else
Nothing else that turns the wheels of solitude
Or spares a breath for kind beatitudes
Or much harsher realities
Than any of us realize

Adrift on plains of change
Not knowing knowledge
Or caring for concern
Without ideas of destinations
People can not know where to find themselves
Or others at some other time
For them there’s only
Here
Now
And in our memory we may find only
Then
There
But still, some of the best parts
Of our lives
Exist only in fragmented fractal patterns
In our minds

Crystalline moments
Contained only by grey matter
And surrounded, enveloped
Overwhelmed by what is present

What we see
Is just a pattern
Of humanity.

Where has all the power gone for good
When nations struggle endlessly toward inaction
Blame for problems squarely laid upon
Those backs already bent by deprivation
Too easy it remains to be at peace
When battles fought are not in your backyard
Ever more sleazy talking heads announce
The death tolls in a decrescending drawl
That fails entirely to help resolve
The tribulations which continue to evolve
From colonies we’ve lost but somehow never held
To terrorists we sought and never found
An endless game of ring around the rose
Whose thorns do cause much pain to those that know
That we are all to blame for this charade
And dancing corpses could not make believe
With gravity equivalent to the many souls
Whose bloodied spirits we have helped enroll
In such cruel parodies of theater shows
As are depicted in the end by rows
Of crosses, headstones, and where we give aid
In burials en grosse we call mass graves
The pits were dug by native hands, it’s true
But each of us helped fill them, me and you.

I cry for all the poets who are dead,
For each and every written poem not read,
For all the troubadours whose verse has failed,
And all the ballads sung that are not hailed,
For all the work that’s yet to be ignored,
For all the editors too easily bored,
For all the manuscripts thrown out in haste,
And all the human genius laid to waste.
I cry for all who ne’er take up the pen,
And those, by doing so, that met their end.