listless drift
metronomic mast sweeps
the sea’s mute tune
snapping flags
halyard and hook ting the pole
spastic anthem
creek burble
amid the cedars
stream unseen
cave echoes
nothing that moves by sight
avoids bumped head
empty bars
rarely known in nature
end robustly
Taken in Northern Thailand in October of 2012.
Taken in August of 2016 on the Sonamarg – Naranag Trail.
The languid roll of the boat signaled loneliness — silently but steadily.
Was it the inseparable connection of wave and hull — each feeling that, despite the lack of distance between them, they would remain distinct?
Was it that there wasn’t another mast for miles, at least the twelve miles out to the horizon?
Was it the motion, purposeless and uniform, a lethargic fidget that signaled anxiousness without anticipation.
Oh! Cast off these khaki shackles!
Like Don Duck, pants raise my hackles.
I’d chuck my slacks in the river Styx,
show all Hades my bag of tricks.
No more this prison for my loins,
and hear these words that I enjoin:
DOWN WITH PANTS!
DOWN WITH PANTS!
DOWN WITH PANTS!
Prince Eugene of Savoy; Taken in December of 2019 at the Budavári Palota
Taken at the Várkert Bazár.
Radnóti wrote, “Walk On, Ye Doomed”
[Járkálj Csak, Halálraítélt!]
in 1936 —
Eight years before he was force marched to death by Nazis.
And I am left to wonder whether he was a prophet,
or whether the Poet’s obsession with death makes him seem prophetic.
Whether he was a prophet or not, he was true to his poem.
There’s at least 750 kilometers between the copper mines of Bor and the tiny northern Hungarian town where he was killed — a place closer to both Bratislava and Vienna than to Budapest.
Call it 500 miles on foot,
emaciated from cracking rock for copper to build the war-machinery of those trying to erase a people — his people.
They found a pocketful of poems on his person when he was exhumed.
If you can’t think of anything else to do in the act of slogging at gunpoint across two countries than to craft poems, you are not a poet, you are THE Poet.
Taken in December of 2019 in Budapest
This tower is one end of the old Church of Mary Magdalene. The rest of the church (save foundations) was destroyed. These days the structure goes by the name “Buda Tower” because it’s a tourist attraction one can use to see the city from on high. The structure dates back to the 13th century.
