Recollections of Somethingness

Moored to anguish with twine made of hedonism

The most desired material thing dissolves in our palms

Too much is oppression, nothing left to rescue, but love

Lift this reality into the black space between the stars

Paint over the old piece with patience strokes of revolution

Every short breath exhales us closer to nothingness

Each dream unpeels the hopelessness of the wasteland

Heroes with murdered tongues, don’t even attempt to speak

Wretchedness protruding from wounded writhing bodies

The shrieks of urgency rendered dim by fleeting infatuations 

Hypnotizing us with titillations, to forget the reverberations of courage

Sneering Crow

I am lost in the quiet 
         before the storm
Woe to the 
     babbling damned who

meander the desolate

     woodland with the petrified trees

            My smile stolen

by the mannequin

      on the back of the crow

Who only visits

     to sneer

              at my crumbled hole

The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature

Nâzım Hikmet Ran, the "romantic Marxist"


The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature


by Nâzım Hikmet Ran


He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman.
The woman's dream was of a miniature house
   with a garden where honeysuckle grows
       in a riot of colours
           that sort of house.


The giant loved like a giant,
and his hands were used to such big things
   that the giant could not
make the building,
   could not knock on the door
of the garden where the honeysuckle grows
    in a riot of colours
        at that house.


He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman,
a mini miniature woman.
The woman was hungry for comfort
    and tired of the giant's long strides.
And bye bye off she went to the embraces of a rich dwarf
with a garden where the honeysuckle grows
   in a riot of colours
       that sort of house.


Now the blue-eyed giant realizes,
a giant isn't even a graveyard for love:
in the garden where the honeysuckle grows
    in a riot of colours
        that sort of house...