BRDM

This extreme boredom’s been following me since my young ages
like a jailed figure under either punishment or experiment
where the stimulated subject is in its own simulation
finding every possibilities to act for a fact
that he is still existing.

I’ve been imprisoned during my entire life even if differently
instead of celled walls, I fenced myself with books,
escaping the outside to inner-made worlds
of writers with the finest thinking
effacing boredom.

But with time even books started to bore me like movies and series,
everything built on the same structure and mechanism;
the so adored knowledge left me alone,
and started to bore me more
as if I knew everything.

Then, escaping boredom became a daily routine among routines;
I got a job just not to be bored between the walls,
at work, I stay the longest and do everything,
but I return every night to the same walls
of I am still imprisoned.

Grabbing the pen to write, boredom kills out my rhymes and virtues:
“Ah, I know these lines.” as if hearing the umpteenth remix
of a song that had kept playing for so long now,
so it became meaningless, awkward
a life in a boredom stow.

Benyamin Bensalah

15.07.2020

Life and Death

Firstly, I experienced the death of my great-grandmother as a child;
it wasn’t sad, but rather shocking to see an inanimate body
and the mourning people around burdened with silence.
I couldn’t understand much of that picture that time,
but my mother was in grief and crying for a long;
she must have a lot of memories with her,
all reaching a dead-end road.

Then, my kind friend – our dog was beaten to death by my old neighbor;
she was my father instead of father and friend instead of friends,
a true mate that was hard to imagine to get so brutalized.
The shock seeing her missing dried up even my cry;
that time, I imagined how my mother might feel
when someone close disappears
and leaves a terrible hole.

Still a child, after the dog I loved, I saw the corpse of the dog I hated;
that huge dog been let out to the side when I walked daily
scared me and made the streets ominous, evil-holding.
I wanted to think of it as a big relief from my fear
that the big, evil dog won’t be around after me,
but I felt grief seeing its bloodshed death;
will it leave a same hole in someone?

Then, news of deaths came and went around with daily regularity;
in the broadcast Queens died, presidents, victims and criminals
as well as at school, acknowledging dead kings and poets.
I thought that great deeds leave a thing to remember,
not to let people die as a fly or a cornered spider,
but I quickly changed my mind at the museum
where generations lay without any memory.

Starting to grow, I realized many terrible things while just living;
terrible things like whole families, weekend parties
and such things I never could have in my life.
These left a hole greater than death itself;
leaving an unknown, missing hole in me,
a hole of me whom I could be,
saying: I never was alive.

Somewhat later, having assured that the holes of non-living remain;
they mark the person and it marked even my personality,
I tried to meet Death by my own, to rejoin the holes.
I failed and left but awkwardness of craze,
my close ones saw me abnormal
and saw no danger seeing me
as a hole, simply disappear.

With knowledge, I understood it later and it made more sense than any;
a person who didn’t live and left no experience
won’t leave holes or griefs in nobody.
All the synopsis-held memories,
all the heartbeat on the globe
like life and death in books
have no meaning at all.

Benyamin Bensalah

12.07.2020

Mites

Billions of microscopic bugs living on the skin, feeding on the dead fruits of the yet living body
while drinking discharged juices, deepened in breeding behind the scenes,
laying their eggs in the crinkles’ valleys, hidden in the hairy forests, under the skin;
marching vehemently in hundred crowds, passing by each other senselessly minding their own business
by thought that they own the body while it’s itchingly screaming up time to time,
rousing wars that scratches up the surface, killing the forests, but not the eggs behind;
by nights leading their pheromonal parties, dancing on the oldest language of propagation
or linguidly ending the daily routines of biting night snacks out of the skin,
sleeping in the meanwhile of the parties’ extravagance and drudgeries’ hodgepodgery;
by mornings eating up the land as starting the hungover routine of consuming
with silenced ears over the crawling of the machinery crowd, and the flushes of the morning urination;
covering the corpus with nameless dead bodies that still serve their automatized occupation,
borrowed instinctive rituals of dead-sitting and welcoming the newborn
breaking out from eggshells to enter the shell of another sequels of dynastic intercourse;
hormonal testaments endorse their own infestation that’s irritated by none but its hipocrisy –
the itchy screaming of the burning land is ceaselessly calling for a final extermination, an end of parasitism,
but the races are just growing and evolving until the best sanitizing can’t touch that one percent scarabies
that might rouse their eggs out of the ashes and revive the never ending infection;
smiting the skin on the head, inside the holes, under the last hidden place hidden from microscopes,
until it can be said that the mites rule, own, enliven or perish the world that is their body.

Homo Demodex Folliculorum

Benyamin Bensalah

12.06.2020

György Faludy: Learn this poem of mine

Learn this poem of mine
because how long this book will be by your side?
If it’s yours, it will be borrowed,
ending in a public library,
and if it’s not: its paper is so crappy,
it will turn yellow, will break, will be raggedy,
will dry out, will shred, will swell,
or it will catch fire calling upon hell,
two hundred and forty degrees is enough –
and what do you think how hot it is, how tough
when a big city becomes ash, burning down?
Learn this poem of mine.

Learn this poem of mine
because soon there will be no book to find,
there will be no poet and no rhyme,
and your car won’t have gasoline,
there won’t be even rum to be drunk,
since the shopkeeper won’t open the shop,
and you may throw out your money,
because the moment is coming with agony,
when your screen instead of image
will transmit a ray of death and cellular damage
and because there will be no one to help,
you will realize the only thing that remains left
as yours, is what your forehead has dined,
you hold.  Give me a place inside.
Learn this poem of mine.

Learn this poem of mine,
and tell me when it’s the deadline
of the seas littered with alkali,
and the industries’ puke already
covers all soils
and grounds, like the drool of snails,
if all of the lakes were killed,
and destruction is coming crippled,
if the leaf is rotting on the trees,
the sources bubble up disease,
and the evening wind brings you cyan:
if you put on the gas mask fine,
you can recite this poem of mine.

Learn this poem of mine,
to let me accompany you. Belike,
and you still survive this millenium,
and a few short years will become,
because the bacilli’s raving
revenge may fail,
and the technology’s greedy
divisions have more power
than the globe moving extremely –
bring it up from your memory
and sing another time to me
these lines: since where it has gone
the beauty and love?

Learn this poem of mine,
to let me accompany you if I’m no more alive
when you will be bothered about the house
where you live because there is no water nor gas,
and you hit the road to find a shelter,
to eat buds, seeds, and other gather,
to find water, get a club,
and if there is no free land, to use that club,
to take the land and kill the man –
there, let me amble with you, man
under ruins and above them
and whisper to you: Undead,
where are you going? Your soul is frozen,
no sooner than you leave the town.
Learn this poem of mine.

It could also be that up there
there is no more world, and you down there,
deep in the bunker you ask:
how many more days until the poisonous
air through the lead sheet
penetrates the concrete?
Then what was for and what worth had
the man, if he arrives to such an end?
How can I send you comfort,
if there is no right but discomfort?
Shall I confess that I was always for you
thinking of you for many, many years
through sunlights and through the nights,
and even I died a long time ago, I am still for you
looking through my two sad eyes?
What else could I tell you before I resign?
Forget this poem of mine.

Benyamin Bensalah

15.04.2020

Translated from the Hungarian poem of György Faludy, “Tanuld meg ezt a versemet”(1980).