I’m waiting for the train,
Far away from the stations,
Far astray in sensations.
I’m waiting for the train,
In an empty thorny cover,
In the emptiness thrown over.
I’m waiting for the train,
Taken my last seat, the mud,
Taking no more worldly drug.
I’m waiting for the train,
Looking backwards nought,
Looking forwards no thought.
I’m waiting for the train,
There’s no other to wait for,
There’s no other to wait for.
I’m waiting for the train.
Benyamin Bensalah
19.03.2016
Just before I could be normal,
I slipped badly even lower –
a pathetic pedestrian animal,
marchant au crève til the collapse.
Benyamin Bensalah
15.01.2021
Once an angel offered mankind a choice
to have power to destroy or
the power to create life.
At that time, there split two different lives
in which we are living happy, and
the other in which we are now.
No one knows how alternate they are,
but it’s an awful day for living and
a beautiful day to die.
Benyamin Bensalah
07.01.2021
These furnitures are grotesque.
I see them around all day along.
They never change, they irritate.
They have no use.
Those wardrobes offer me no clothes to wear;
No reason to dress up,
No reason to look anyhow;
Yet they lock up clothes of no usage.
Those chairs are spiteful;
No one sits in them,
And call no one to sit;
Yet they are so many.
Those tables are horrid;
Half empty-half stucked,
And the whole thing is for usage;
Yet they don’t make me to put on them anything.
Those shelves are judging;
Holding those read and unread books,
And the thick dust on them all around;
Yet there’s no reason to approach the whole.
The desk, with the no use computer –
The stove, with the cold cole in it –
The cupboard with glasses filled with air –
The fridge that doesn’t open randomly anymore –
The carpet that detests the steps on it –
The mass grave of bathroom cabinets –
The insignificant pictures on the wall –
The wooden ceiling that just covers them all,
and this bed I am lying in with no use
Are just grotesque.
Benyamin Bensalah
09.12.2020
I’ve never seen a word such suffocating –
such as regret.
I stuffed my already crowded mind with lies
such as I never feel regret.
I stuffed my ego with lies that I deserved this all,
and all the bad is out of regret.
I went dreamwalking with that chestboard in my chest,
seeing all pain I was used to, but regret.
While the word kept me chasing, just as my chest kept aching
from what I wasn’t able to see that I do regret.
My chest is opening now, with unusual pain that is searing me down,
but I’m somehow happy to hear that I do regret.
All the pain I caused, not just to myself alone, not just to the one I loved,
but for everyone who had to pay for my pain – I regret.
I don’t know how could it be possible now to be a better person from now,
and I really don’t know it like I didn’t know it back from now, but I regret.
This word is here now, that kept me suffocating – crying – waiting for answers in my hiding,
but I am free now; free as a hated criminal who’s not enjailed now, and knows only one word
only one word that he murmurs alone:
I regret.
Bensalah Benyamin
04.12.2020, 04:20 am
The Violin
was amongst
my first inspirations
as a child
gifted by poetry,
instead of
happiness.
The childish poem sounded somewhat
like these lines, but in my mother tongue:
(Even if poetry
is a language itself.)
“My heart is like a violin with its cords;
When I’m easy on them, it plays kindly,”
(Nice metaphor;
wasn’t I a smart kid?)
“But when I force on it, it cries up and breaks,
Leaving every heart in a broken silence.”
(Oh, woow,
that’s the ol’ me.)
This is the poem on which I got the warning:
“Sane kids don’t write such gibberish larking!”.
That was harming,
but the world
harmed me more
than such words;
so, I didn’t stop
writing because of a
badly criticized
poem, named:
The Violin.
However, I felt
weird towards
that instrument
from then.
I watched weirdly
the rich kids
playing on them freely;
without nobody
telling to them:
You are insane
Doing what you do,
that rubbish larking.
That was hard to understand that time
why one’s art was seen crazy, and other’s playing was genius.
But after some materialistically and socially hitting slaps on my face,
I understood how it is exactly working with this terrible human race:
The rich that follows and serves the example of enjoying being
will be never replaced by the deep thinker wrapped up in grieving.
Realizing it was sad, but truth is enlightening.
This is why I returned to this magical instrument, now,
with its amazing sounds that leave my heart happily crying.
Just a decade and some years before, I was comparing my heart to those cords
that can make such a beauty the Earth is barely able to hold, within such a sadness,
within such a chance to fail and ruin everything, leaving rooms in heart-torn silence.
This divine instruments must not be played but by the devil
who knows what is true sin, and how gets fallen a daredevil.
Let the devil take the cords, let him take my heart with them, too.
I’ve needed no more than to truly know what is hiding in
this world and this heart that makes me love
a sad and gloomy while also pompous
violin playing.
Benyamin Bensalah
01.01.2020
No mellifluous lightbeams of the morning sun,
not even heated kissing of Helium atoms;
No crowing alarms waiting like a loaded gun,
not even deceived asleep minutes of cogs.
No rythmic murmurs of labour-heading steps,
not even monotonous capitalist torture;
No chopstick drums on the lunchboxed crêpes,
not even wasted earthlings’ nourriture.
No freedom fanfares from the last man-hour,
not even we are remaining slaves;
No loose hugging in a rencontre’s empower’,
not even we’re all meeting in graves.
No dark, star-brighted blanket’s planetary cover,
not even nightly phantoms of Paris;
No crawling consciousness’ journey to discover,
not even primates gazing to an abyss.
No poems today, no artistic magnificence,
not even music, not even dance;
No poems today, and this day is a lie
because without art we’re not alive.
Benyamin Bensalah
07.08.2020
As a child who swore revenge
and set the father’s house on fire
and now strangeness settles on him like a foggy stench,
and only by the one against whom he did conspire,
he could cry himself out, his covered up
face to show his free smile, –
I am forcing it so hopelessly I’d rather give up
to my tears: to find what I am worthwhile.
I cremated a world in my heart
and there’s no good word to cry on as a start,
huddled up I am just waiting for the prodigy,
that someone may come to accept my apology
and tells me nicely what absurdity
needs to be forgiven in this pitfall of mort!
Benyamin Bensalah
19.06.2020
Translated from the Hungarian poem of Attila József, “Mint gyermek…”(1935).
Your virtue is my virtue,
Your feelings are my feelings,
Your family’s become my family
and it goes
Until the world is my world.
Benyamin Bensalah
20.04.2020
Probably somebody popped up in my mind –
Among all those possibilities
Out of the void,
Among all those responsibilities
I try to avoid,
There’s a beam of trust
That holds every doubtful thing as a whole,
That gives me and only me a role,
That keeps me human after all –
Monsters must or must not be alone –
Keeping you as my mortal and eternal goal.
Benyamin Bensalah
10.10.2018
