Vultures Descend: Mutilated Spectral
All the birds are chased away
Only vultures remain
stitching darkest clouds
Photon covered faces
the vacuum blankets
faintly visible through the shroud
no one can see this dirty magic
The Voodoo king’s strange hubris
on the horizon
where the sky shrinks over the Azov Sea
Vultures descend from their hideouts
knifing the belly of the darkest sky
their wings spread over
Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Crimea
Vultures on the sea
on the wetland
at the peaks of rolling hills
in the human niche
The smell of dead flesh
wounds and blood
fragments of crushed bones
Vultures descend
on this mutilated spectral
knifing through the belly
of the darkest sky
Cathedral spires, lonely pines,
bewildered channers
dews of torments
kisses! soothing potions
But they join the weeping willows
by the wetland
wetland of blood
soaked with the puddles of blood
Vultures descend
on this mutilated spectral
knifing through the belly
of the darkest sky
***
The Specter of Marx Gently Hugged His Soul
I knew her at the University
we were selling lectures
some might say we are mountebanks
selling snake oils:
evolution, climate change, moral relativism
Do I care? Not at all
It was several years after Katrina,
a manmade touch-up of the demon’s wrath
that transformed, not metamorphosed,
us, ghosts of Dasein, in the universe of nothingness,
sitting at this coffee house of Munich
I felt disgusted,
almost throwing up,
was I sipping the blood
of the bloodhounds of Hofbrauhaus
—the Nazi beasts of Hitler?
I gently dragged her from the Marienplatz,
Munich’s central attraction,
like the centers of all big cities
it is a termite nest,
swarming in spring and summer
Do I care? Not at all
We ended up by the Issar river
she was weeping
Miseria’s sad swim
in the ocean of nothingness
I apologized.
I had just followed the tourist lights
like a lamb
until I saw the artwork
of the antisemite beasts’
beginning of carnage
It was simply my mistake my ignorance,
definitely not a rational excuse,
an excuse without heart, flesh, wave, or particle
She pulled herself together.
Then she told me the story of her dad,
an ethnic Ukrainian,
a partisan peasant who loved
his horse with one blind eye,
like humans seeing only through one eye,
fought, betrayed, caught.
His flesh, bones, marrows
sublimated gases,
perhaps, his soul escaped
Perhaps, the specter of Marx gently hugged
his soul, if it existed
