…that drinking ruins my life?
Hah, already ruined,
and the simple fact that I’m alive
is already a part of paying the price.
Actually, there are days I can live
with the thought of myself,
and also there are when I have no money,
so my drinking is in balance.
But… if you mentioned drinking,
could you lend me some pennies?
You know, I’m a bit short of…
…reason to live.
Benyamin Bensalah
30.11.2020
My heart is an empty stack,
For what, only myself deserves smack,
But it hurts.
Whoever falls into it
Will hang with me in it,
Such as: but it hurts!
My life’s a lifeless winter,
It’s snowing my head so sinister,
But it hurts.
My venom broke out if it would dare,
If there were anger, would you dare,
A lord of pain who hurts.
Although fate would finally give a way,
I’m not waiting only to give away,
So, let it hurt if it has to hurt.
Benyamin Bensalah
29.12.2017
Translated from my Hungarian poem, “Fájjon ha fájni kell.”
I was scrolling up and down,
Looking for some particular verses-
From poems, books or famous quotes-
To face the world and use words versus.
Tons of words like raindrops
Splashed my face, the windshield-
Shield against the tiring emotions that
Hurt and hurt me, but never ever healed.
Then, I met a world of water
Where every word is a great ocean-
Reading Camus, Pinker, Schrödinger,
Trading awareness instead of emotion.
Benyamin Bensalah
13.06.2018
At the last moment, every creature tries to break up towards the light when the last breath is about to say hello to the darkness… That is the monster, what others know hope.
Me: I did love you.
You don’t love me anymore?!
Me: You don’t believe in love. I shouldn’t love you. Doubts kill me. While…
…I love you.
Me: Me too.
Benyamin Bensalah
20.09.2018
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
If girls were poems,
they would be the haikus’
beautiful rambling.
Benyamin Bensalah
29.04.2020
This step on the dust of the pavement,
stepped slowly and with passion,
reflects the magic of body
and this worldly physics:
What a dynamics!
That horn tooting in the wrooming,
human feelings in mechanics,
resonates the air with waves
of microscopic tsunamis:
What a composition!
In this garbage, that apple stump,
nature and city grabbed as one,
radiates an endless ending
of turning and returning:
The cycle of life!
This worth of that leaving moment,
been here, but now it’s Faraway,
creates newly lost happiness
of “it was” and ‘no worries’:
Persistent miseries.
Seizing every very moment as it is,
like the guy with no memories,
brings ecstasy to learning –
relearning thing to thing:
Micro-Recoveries.
Benyamin Bensalah
04.03.2020
Guilt-pushed wet pillow on my face;
What have I done? There’s no trace,
But there must have something happened,
There must have something happened.
I don’t know much what’s going on;
I have no goal, no role I could be living on,
I’m just surviving day to day,
Day to day.
But today – tonight, I opened a file;
Full of photos of a guy with the same profile,
But he is stranger to me,
Stranger to me.
On the photos, he was with a girl;
I would lie if I say I don’t know her,
But I can feel nothing,
I can feel nothing.
I don’t know who’s that guy;
He was so happy, but how and why,
How is it possible,
It’s impossible.
I don’t know who they are;
Why are they so bizarre,
They are a copy of me,
Were a copy of me.
That guy was in love with her;
Then, why I can’t refer,
What’s going on,
What’s going on.
You hurt and destroyed her;
But I didn’t even know her,
No, it’s all your fault,
It’s all your fault.
I’m guilty and for sure I’m crying;
I wish I could be faster dying,
Rather than feeling guilty,
While it wasn’t me.
I don’t know that guy, nor myself;
That girl must have left our self,
I am alone with my pain,
Who am I? I claim.
I sleep some nights or glance my eyes;
It happens: everything resets as lies,
But I didn’t mean any of that hurt,
I should have put out an alert:
Don’t approach; I may be fine today;
But I’m a new person every day,
Making you happy for a while,
Then, putting you into a file
With a lost profile
That comes out rarely
Feeling guilty,
Unhealthy,
Crazy.
Benyamin Bensalah
29.02.2020
I trusted only myself from the beginning –
if you have nothing, the cost will be willing
for the man. In no way it will be more
than for the animal that dropped not living anymore.
Even if I was scared, I found my stand-
I was born, I mingled and I did out-stand.
I even paid everyone just as was the measure,
who gave it for free, I accepted with pleasure.
Women, if I was play-toy for any of their flattery:
I believed it really – let them be happy!
I scrubbed ships, pulling buckets as my only tool.
Among smart gentlemen, I played the fool.
I sold spinners, breads and books,
newspapers, poems – whenever what smooths.
Not in a glorious combat, not on a gentle rope,
but I end up in a bed, sometimes I hope.
Either way, now the inventory is ready.
I lived – and even others have died in it already.
Benyamin Bensalah
18.02.2020
Translated from the Hungarian poem of Attila Jozsef, “Kész a leltár” (1936).
Seven savage centurions,
Swearing in their saint union’s
Scoured, scouted for sacredness,
Spreading but mere senselessness.
Seven souls sorted by Ceasar
Soullessly scorched the soil spare,
Sending to scourge not just its cereal,
But with seven skint scullions seen there.
In the circling flame’s stake,
Seeing no but smoke and flame,
Seeing no scape to suddenly recoil,
Sadly screamed the servants of the soil.
So, been so scared, suffocating,
Scarcely sober and scarcely seeing,
Thinking their souls cease on that soil,
They started a pray as a last toil on that soil.
Saying sour words to their gods,
But none seemed to soothe the odds,
No Ceres, Venus and no sound from Zeus,
Scullions suffer godless, they had to deduce.
Six scullions snared by scare,
But a single turned scare to dare,
Sending his sidekicks into fire graves,
Instinctively building a bridge of slaves.
Then, the savage scullion
Before being seen by any centurion,
Stabbed their posteriors from one to six,
Til the seventh slaughtered him for his sins.
Benyamin Bensalah
22.11.2018
