Dejan Budimir

There's been a movie not so long ago In which a scientist purports to show That at the instant of one's death The human soul leaves with the final breath And that therefore its absence may be weighed By the dead body's most subtle difference in weight But because the author chooses not to mention That "weight" would contradict ascension And that invisible things with nonzero masses Are better known as the greenhouse gases It's for this kind of inconsequential thinking in the arts That his soul shall one day mingle with the farts

It makes sense that Freud would try to attribute to the psychosis In light of its more negative prognosis Repression of what in his view Was much more shameful a taboo Than what would be sufficient for neurosis He was attempting to reduce the difference in kind To a difference of dosis And since the only taboos he could find Were incest, homosexuality, and murder The only way to press on further Was to pick three and combine Thus Schreber was gay for his daddy Whom he also wished to kill But who had passed away already And left a hole words could no longer fill

If you're looking at a working regularity You're not looking at the whole in its totality For that which works marks only a small part Of larger things with buttons marked "restart"

This is how scientific thought begins : The relationship between all things Be they material or mental Is either causal or coincidental But seeking patterns in the latter is in vain For who finds meaning in the random always goes insane

Silence is called perfect speech But you cannot practice it and teach Which makes it just like theory to me A product of the university You leave it outside of the temple What lives here lives on by example

The fact that we see bodies with or without soul But never see a soul without a body Does not mean that our eyes are rather shoddy But that the world is not the whole The world hence points away at God Who left His signature omission To be filled in by our double vision Provided that "the soul" is not a fraud

Myths of our creation Are acts of self-aggrandization Pretending God is our fan Or that we figure in his plan . Although it may be true indeed That God has the ability to need The fact of needing our participation Would prove His limitation And by denying His perfection We are denied the satisfaction Of being well-designed . Such is the stuff that He could find And with the tools He had to hand Our maker did just like a man : He did the best He can . And to care for us despite all that we lack One really has to appreciate a hack As oftentimes I find delight In thinking He just might .

She wears her pretty face Like a portable private space ( The introvert's most prized possession ) Without the slightest hint of an expression And an inward-looking gaze Betraying symptoms of a clinical depression Which she would rather call malaise And with an eye-contact avoidant stare She'd look past you at something over there But when you turn to see it's always gone And now she's looking at her phone Just take the hint and roam

The Critique of political economy Begins with an apology For the illness which delayed its publication For the atmosphere of procrastination In which all writing must take place Is hence here made no case

1 We find that all things everywhere Are either made or found But nothing's pulled out of thin air "To make" thus makes an artificial sound Unless it mean "to tease out of the ground" 2 "To make" means to put what is found together A pen is ink touched to a feather And poetry is meaning joined to sound Is man likewise half spirit and half earth ? Or is "to find" a synonym of birth ? 3 A poem is half put together and half grown It lies implicit in a language not our own

The suffix -ion at its best Can make a question of a quest And turn a destiny from vague equivocation Towards a concrete destination But when too harshly pressed : Depression

The depth of Magritte's "Looking Glass" of 1963 Is of a higher order quality than the unaided eye can see Suffice to notice that the sky is not just painted on the panes Lest the weather be erased by its own rains But how the gap in the illusory extremal Is part of the same missing epistemal With which the mind accords One picture here thus speaks a thousand words About the color of non-color The impossibility of actual transparency And shows the finite's constitutive need for the eternal The confinedness of outsideness by what we call internal

Six walls define this sleeping room But one of them is king Sometimes it speaks and I awake To learn about affairs of state But the noises that a wall can make Are just not very interesting More like the intermittent boom Of a circ'ambulent baboon Who hasn't yet been fed But whatever goes on overhead Being powerless I lie in bed With thoughts unthought and books unread And watch the paintjob flake And hope it isn't for my sake That the king should twist my pantaloon Instead of much more softly tread Lest the revolution be upsped And to the shouts "off with his head!" His reign be ended soon That peace once more may spread Long live the king who's dead!

Schöpfung, which is german for "creation", Describes the action of a bucket in a well Whereby a thing depleted must descend to hell And must be full again upon its elevation What drags us down is hence not our weight But the lack of faith which turns lack into hate

The Earth's a sphere so vast That its curvature seems flat Maybe time is just like that : Once the future at some point Will have turned into the past What made the two disjoint ? Is time an arrow or a noose ? Is it a valid premonition That everything is repetition Or is it just the least ambitious Way of playing fast and loose With our definitions ? So which way do I bend ? We know from studying the gases That once a moment passes Something else must pass along Which can serve no useful end And which may never be undone Gone not in the usual sense Of leaking out of a container But in a sense much plainer : What was free has now been bound And has left our sphere of influence And is claimed by the background

The world is structured very neatly You could alter any of its parts completely And barely notice any change whatever But the universal law is brittle Were you to change it but a little The oceans would boil over and the planets fall together

Is the logos our true dimension Or is reason just our appetites' extension Which is discovery, which is invention What is the difference between the Want and Ought That I am my feeling but that I do my thought Do not both intrude unwanted and unsought

Climate change is finally a thing Said the oil baron to the king Who said : Come again? I wasn't listening Climate change is finally a thing What does this mean for the demand Asked him the owner of the land My lord I do not understand What does this mean for the demand It means there's nothing for the prince The next great dying out begins The king of kings has tallied our sins It means there's nothing for the prince

No sooner found that it is great Than felt the urge to denigrate The world by stripping it of meaning Inventing some much greater being Asserting that it's too complex To have had come about nihilo ex Meant greatness of a lesser kind Which therefore had to be designed It is such manufactured things Of which my Bible sings

While I was waiting for a train There appeared three young gandarme Whose presence there was nothing to explain My social anxiety must have triggered an alarm Prepared for harm they passed me by Then turned around and passed me by again An electronic eye Must have picked up on the heat The bloodflow pattern in a vein The involuntary skipping of a beat

Governments, like operating systems, are robust This follows from their definition as a must Which hasn't got a lot to do as such With trust or with stability so much As with the primacy of continuity The ability to function under stress To recover from and work through its own mess

Nicht alle Menschen gehen wählen. Am Wahltag werden viele Stimmen fehlen. Wer kann sie mir erklären? Fällt es ihnen schwer Entscheidungen zu fällen? Jede Stimme für das eine Lager mehr Vernichtet eine in dem oppositionellen.

I couldn't make it to my leftist demonstration I know I am no credit to my generation But though it may be indistinguishable from procrastination The explanation is that it depends The alienation which outside is marching on with you Exists not only from the Marxist point of view But in the medical sense too I wish I could have made it to the picket fence But as it stands I barely managed my body's verticalization Out of bed and on to my workstation The world has more to do with move semantics than with zero-game summation Ressource acquisition is initialization .

Midway on the journey through my only life I find myself re-reading Genesis 2:25 About the nakedness of Adam and his wife Where I am struck with the significance of shame : How with this one feeling all their many troubles came . And I've been hoping, but apparently in vain, That those parts of the passage that are plain Are powerful enough those others to explain For the serpent sounds persuasive to my ear : "If God knows everything then there is nothing to fear." Sounds like a true philosopher to me ! What makes no sense is that forbidden tree Which brought our death to life and made our lives unfree . When husband and wife had merely chosen one another, Over and above their Father ; Was Genesis 2:24 therefore just blather ? It seems the author may have been confused : Where a metaphor was not misused It was embellished, mixed, and fused As if to dignify or to obscure its much too simple gist And to enable the spirit of the teaching to be missed . The tree of which we speak is not that of the Botanist It is a thing which grows as much as towards light Away from it also and out of sight . I gather from the story just this mustard bit : Between the inner and the outer occured somehow a split And human plight has been the foremost consequence of it .

When all is said and done What's most surprising about E. coli Syn61 Is that despite so much redundance having gone The life in the small critter rages on ! I'm awed and terrified and proud At the fertility of scientific doubt, Of our ability to reach down to the Adēlon . But trying to explain life's essence being Exactly that which gives intelligence its meaning The effort in itself is less of a surprise Than synthetic life's brave staving off demise .

Nachts wach' ich mehrmals wieder auf Die Kopfhaut kribbelt und ich schnauf' . Ich schnarche wohl vom Staub ! Das Hirn wird langsam langsam und wie taub ; Möglich gehe ich so drauf .

Ever since my last trip to a clinic I've been ailing Spending most my time in bed With a Möbius strip in head Trying cutting it and failing like a dunce Noticing that drawing goes two times around While the cut goes only once .

While the prodrome runs subclinical It weighs no less inimical : All treatment, if delayed, falls flat Regardless of how adequate at that . A loss of trust is typical .

Give me liberty ! Or else provide me with some datum Such as would incentivize to rethink this ultimatum ; Perchance to re-invigorate in me the question Of whether not a longer life devoted to reflexion, In other words : a fuller measure Of sustained self-critical displeasure, May serve to end up disabusing me From the concept of nobility

Als sänke ich in Selbstmitleid dahin by Dejan Budimir

Locker Room Talk #1 by Dejan Budimir

A quick remix of the poem as read by Algy Pug & Tzvetomira Dumovska (emperpep) at LibriVox. See: https://librivox.org/a-burnt-ship-by-john-donne/ for more info.