The Mirror of Darkness

Tonight is not a particular night;
This is a night among the nights:

I woke up in the middle of darkness,
Not knowing what to do with my own darkness;
So, I lit up a cigarette and faced the mirror:
There was only darkness in the mirror,
And a half face blazing up time to time –
Sometimes, we just want something to happen, it was a time.

I was thinking of summoning Bloody Mary;
I hoped for a ghost girl appearing behind me –
Something that signs me that I’m not alone.
But, the only monster closest around me
Was me, nothing, just me alone.
No ghosts, no robbers, no Bloody Maries.

It was not new to me that monsters were not real,
But it’s always surprising that I am –
Finding myself always as my own Boogeyman.
We’re in need of Satans, devils and evil polititans
To avoid facing the mirror of darkness;
That reveals only us and us again.

These are dangerous thoughts,
Knowing about the darkness in the man;
Because we’ll see Satans, devils and evil polititans
In us, and so as in every man.
Once seen, there will be no more hiding;
We will meet darkness again and again and again.

Benyamin Bensalah

07.02.2020

Heartlock

Birth
Is a curse –
The course of pathos –
To unsense the nonsense,
At first, your heart must be locked.

Call a locksmith, or become yourself,
Tho’ one lock won’t fix the life –
The ever strife of study –
To escape the legging,
Another locking.

You can never hide,
Your pocket cries out –
Not the tailor is the traitor –
To silence your empty stomach,
Again, your heart ought to lock up.

The ever hardship being a human,
Defenselessly desires the love –
The ever blazing consuming –
To unblind the avid eyes,
The fourth lock hies.

The locks sacrifice,
For the sacred conscience –
The ironed et rusting heart –
To fend the sober brain’s cogs,
Lock the heart and even the locks.

Benyamin Bensalah

20.03.2018

Grey Rays

Grey-blue pastel strokes brush the sun behind,
Leaving just enough light to the ground
To see the city, see the city with its toxicity;
Concrete jungle with vrooming sounds,
Soulless machines, and in them souls with wounds.

There’s no greenness behind greyness,
But meaningless parks as mere illusions
To keep our primal instincts alive –
Keeping them machine-fed, coma-like.
The art of nature’s hard to realise.

Parks are the new heart of the city,
Us – not even feeling pity,
Going there to fetch our nurture,
So-called being in the nature
As hypocrite machines.

Is there other machines lying
To themselves as we do –
By laying plants surrounding
While concretely it’s not
The green we went through?

How come then on the sky,
On that grayish sunbeam
Made of pastel and bluish dye;
We’re still a part of this sight,
Human machines as we are.

Benyamin Bensalah

12.11.2018

The Cancer

The world is a cancer –
There’s dirt and dust flowing on every veinly street,
Mad, humanoid particles street on them vainly,
Sharing their despairing existence with feigned determination
While the sick world is the only determiner here,
Declaring that this disease must run forward into eternity,
So, Run! Roll! Crawl! Till another particle replaces you,
And you become a chromosomic history of a forgotten pest
That rambled with its terrifying fever over the lands,
Leaving behind lunatic hallucinations wished to be unreal;
People eating from people, people biting off their own nipple,
People holing bodies and filling, filling, filling the holes,
People eating shit! People being people!
Holding zoological pictures as examples that we could be,
Ideological thoughts of a mothering home
That is nothing more for us than a body to feed on,
To feed on and replicate, to feed on and replicate,
To feed on and replicate on our own mother again and again,
In order to pass over our shared despair and push this disease,
Eating up the world, eating up ourselves,
Eating up the thoughts that face this epidemic, and its particles
That are for and not against, for and not against
This system of terror that creates to destroy, builds to demolish,
Breeds to aborticide, gets birth to commit suicide,
Eats to throw up even if it was by someone already eaten,
Then, let it be a feast! A celebration!
On which we shout into the sky our names,
The names of our civilization! Our religion!
“We are all part of it, and to it we belong, we return!”
The Cancer.

Benyamin Bensalah

02.01.2020

The Venom of Life

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s sneaking in the veins,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how slowly it attacks the brains.
In several deceitful sweet delight,
Like sugar-cube it melts, if it rains.

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s dwelling in the artery,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how it makes the heart flurry.
Encouraging to reach the height,
It feints to make you jump from it.

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s squelchin’ in the flesh,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how it rots the fibers into trash.
That lift a great burden one time,
Under a lightsome burden will crash.

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s running in the nerves,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how many illusions it serves.
It’s inspiring the purest rhyme,
Reserving always the darkest verse.

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s working in the bones,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how it’s kissing the earth, downs.
Amourously with the earthly life,
It gets buried by earth and stones.

Who said to taste the venom of life?
Its poison’s smolderin’ in the soul,
Taking six senses from the five,
Look how it burns the deadly coeur.
Seeking salvation from living fire,
It feels thirsty for liquid death liquor.

Benyamin Bensalah

25.04.2016

Never go against nature

There’s none who could swim
Against the stream for ever.

There’s no one who lived
So long under water.

There’s none near the other sex
And resisted the fever.

There’s no one who’d be a prey
And became predator.

There’s no escape from the cruel life
Never go against nature.

Benyamin Bensalah

03.08.2018

On Desires

What desire should be for a highly complicated animal like us
Is the pleasure of satisfying the chain of every living: survive and reproduce.
Though, I find no pleasure in such trivial repetitions,
No desire to survive, nor to reproduce.

Thus, desires for me are rather like bucket lists, pure experience
That I can achieve in my miserable lifespan.
Such as pleasing others by causing satisfaction,
Or just in the contrary, it does not even matter until I get my experience.

Benyamin Bensalah

01.06.2019