Kafkaesque Poems

Questions galore

Do the leaves of our cups also turn yellow ?
The rooms of green grass collect cobwebs 
From the Kafkaesque vermin, fly away cuckoos 
Questions galore in the river's tide and ebb
     
              ____________________

                 September 5, 2025

Scripts Of The Macabre

Creepy crawlies and heebie-jeebies
raw ripples on your skin kafkaesque;
You peek at that dark monstrosity,
cannot tell if it’s a trick or treat;
Nerves taunt with chimerical spectres;

Weepy eyes are stung by angry bees,
‘Pshaw!’ escapes a story so grotesque;
Flew through your mouth unable to flee,
caught swelled saliva starts to secrete;
Serves well scripts of macabre directors.

Kafkaesque

From that synthetic blossom
Emanate both a swirling silence
And a timeless illusion
Embedded in rustic profusion.

Yet a timeless blossom
To a rustic mind
Signifies no swirling illusion
But from it emerge and emanate 
The opposite of a synthetic silence

On this planet timeless we are not
Unless our planet is a synthetic illusion
Leaving our minds swirling
And lost in rustic confusion
From which will emanate
A blossom to stun us into silence

That shock will plunge us into a timeless void
When silence surrounds illusion 
In a synthetic world where minds no longer blossom
Spiralling into a swirling rustic state
From which nothing can emanate

DO NOT MISS THE MOON, WHILE COUNTING THE STARS

DO NOT MISS THE MOON, WHILE COUNTING THE STARS
Do not be carried away by the deceit,
Of an oozing chant of a back palm’s stew;
For the meat that source and house it,
Will slip and off it will drift like dew;
So, do not miss the sun,
While counting the smiles of the stars,
Kafkaesque!
Most magic moments oblique,
The conscientiousness to tame,
And the illusionary shadow’s of blame.
Sometimes, I don’t want,
You to know what I think,
That’s why I hide it in a plant,
A tarred bowdlerize wink;
So, do not stay too long....
Looking at the sun, especially her eclipse.
Alas! The jaded aglet corpse!
I have wringed wet maelstroms,
What you have in your palm,
Is bigger than the shadow storms,
So, do not waste hours counting, 
Those deceitful stars__
When all you need is the moon!
For this is an overweening;
Err that mar many: a raconteur.
    ~ Tile

A Novel Season

You said, ‘move on’
As it is a new season
This sounds like a Kafkaesque novelty
This is an ungodly form of hypocrisy
Suffused with a boisterous rudeness
Ingratitude can only brings sadness
You forgot about the awesomely beautiful memories
You’re now a ruthless omen imbued with ruses
Still, every day should be a new season
A new hour to enthrall or to beckon
It’s a shame that you’ve changed style
And your behavior is now odd and vile
I will move on as suggested
Yet, I know that memories can never be deleted
Erased or obliterated. You’re forever indebted
As I am obliged ad vitam aeternam to cherish you, my friend
Sorry that you’re no longer in need of a helping hand
Remember that the past is important
The present is interesting and tomorrow
Or the future will be an amalgam of joy and sorrow
This is a novel season
 I have bravely moved on
And you are cowardly in contempt.

Copyright © December 2023, Hébert Logerie, All rights reserved.
Hébert Logerie is the author of several collections of poems.

Kafkaeqsue

There’s a charge against you
Though we can’t say what it is 
In time, your list of crimes will be released

Pardon our procedures –
We consider grievances
We’ll clear your good name after you’re deceased

A labyrinth of halls and secret tunnels
In a bureaucratic lair
The ambiguity of nightmares
Is the only business there

This deviant behavior
Must be addressed at once 
Our agents will turn up who you really are

The whole investigation 
Could take a couple months 
Please be on-call, and don’t wander too far

A labyrinth of halls and secret tunnels
In a bureaucratic lair
The ambiguity of nightmares
Is the only business there

Nothing makes sense
When it’s Kafkaesque 

In a language spewing jargon,
Behind coercing eyes,
Our Grand Inquisitor will take his turn

One half-expects a pardon
When one’s past is scrutinized
Lest one is subjected to public shame and then burned
 
Nothing makes sense
When it’s Kafkaesque

Study In Kafkaesque

I slowly come to 
as light creeps across the floor
and dissolves what I thought
had fallen through
the torn sides of a dream.
Nothing is there but
the scuff marks left 
by fleeing ghosts.

Unalterable facts assemble 
and lock shut around 
a narrowing space housing all 
that I think I am.
Faces appear and find
their place in the gallery
of portraits, some smiling 
others wearing a haunting 
sadness. Love attaches 
and takes up the tension 
as thoughts move and stretch, 
each nerve linking 
to a loved one. I hold on 
and hope it's enough.

Then fear rummages through
its wardrobe of masks, trying on
each to see what best fits
the day. It likes to look ahead.
Morning begins its rituals
to hold back a harm
that hangs over me
or stop the countdown 
ticking towards some
menacing, undisclosed 
catastrophe.

Kafkaesque

I ponder whose hands concertina time.
Sometimes my brain wakes up 40 years younger
for a few moments I am vital,
perfectly formed and a smile for every eye.
Other times though, I arrive in the world
already clawing at my coffin lid.

I'm riding a double-decker London bus,
there's a girl beside me
and she is rubbing the inside of my thighs
while she talks of Kafka.

Now I'm in a train, liver-spotted hands
trembling, as I myopically read a book
about bloody Kafka;
I am gonna have to read some of his stuff one day.

It’s another morning,
and I am hill running with my 10 year old son.
Breathless we get to the top
he is laughing and I am winded.

Now I recall Kafka's book, 'The Metamorphosis',
still don't have to read it,
I understand perfectly well
that the hands of time
are always squeezing us into what we were
by what we became.

I Almost Wrote a Poem

“I need you
and dream of you
while I try to
drink you away”

I almost wrote a poem
that began like this
(many years ago)
to express my 
unrequited infatuation
for a certain 
beguiling & baffling
woman.

I almost wrote a poem
that rambled on 
unpoetically about
all the tormented 
feelings & dark ideas
that poisoned 
my already warped mind.

But instead—
I drowned my sorrows
and dragged my
sorrowful sardonic self 
through lowly jobs & lofty ideas
like a Kafkaesque Sisyphus
 
--and eructed corrosive prose
parodying frenemies
as friends became enemies
and I found myself
submerged in a private
cold war with the world
(during the Cold War)
in the torrid, torpid
River City where
the alienated artisans
ate their own.

Maybe someday
in the distant future (2020s?)
if I’m still around
if the world is still around…
I’ll actually write 
this forgettable poem
and wish I hadn’t.

In Sandy On a Sundy

In Sandy on a Sund’y
Can’t even buy a pie
The High Street is a ghost town
From some Kafkaesque sci-fi.
Not a single caf is open
No point in asking ‘Why?’
So I’ll just go down
To the Rose and Crown
And give their roast a try.

The film set has now altered
To a Sergio Leone
The barman with the hang-dog look
Is sitting all alone.
I enquire after Sunday Lunch
His reply comes Brummily spoken.
‘No food today,
I’m afraid to say.
The chef’s right arm is broken.’

So homeward I trudge
To a can of stodge
That I’d been keeping handy
And I curse the day
I decided to stay
In this Sabbath-subserving Sandy.

The Path To Self

Oh, now and then I lose my way, could this be true for you as well?
Though dreams suggest a brand-new day, there's something left to tell,
It's not that I put blinders on, forgot old debts or new, I mean,
I’d love to live, a help not harm, and never, ever, cause a scene.

This path to self quite often missed, the horse I ride makes turns for worse,
Demonic unseen snake has hissed or rattled out a curse,
A buck or two, horse straightens out, but all my plans could be at risk!
I look compass, for I've doubts; to know the future’s Kafkaesque!

You count on me to do my best; I pray to Heaven you stay near!
I lose my way; I fail each test, and yet you hold me, dear?
I sometimes feel like I’m from Mars, so much I lack in earthy charms,
The path to self may live in stars, but fallen man lives in your arms.


Brian Johnston
May 19, 2018

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy,
approximately 800 redundant pages
of Kafkaesque scoffing
at relentless banalities of economic and political elitists.

Rather like transcribing often inebriated conversations
within all-night insider celebrations 
of a ProPlutocracy Party Convention

Or, sadly, a depressed weed-rant
at the end of a long defensive policy debate
among inter-religiously woke Democrats
longing for a win/win DanceParty Convention,
like in the good-old liberally bipartisan ballroom days

Only maybe about 400 condensed
impacted pages shorter
with the remainder quite unliterally
and anti-climatically inscrutable
as planned anti-ecological obsolescence
through mutually partisan assured destruction

Drinking and smoking 
through organic Earth's rabidly dark night
denying and/or distracted
from synergetically addressing
our unwell-disorganizing Anthropocene 
of epically AnthroNarcissistic
autocratic-monopolistic chaos

Adding nothing more useful
or healthy
or sacred
to Kafkaesque scoffing
at relentlessly drunk banalities 
of economic and political elitists.

Hunger Artist

Hunger Artist - A Kafkaesque Moment
                 By: Earl Schumacker

                       (influenced by “A Hunger Artist”- short story by: Franz Kafka)

Food is foreign and mysterious to me now
Tolerance for such things is vile
My art once held the masses
In a mesmerizing enchanted grip
These days nothing matters
Death by hunger is dismissed
No one comes by my cage
To keep me faithful to my pain, as it really is
Starvation has lost its style
Or flavor should I say
Such enlightenment and with it fame
Once came quick
The children gathered by the thousands
To prove that nothing happened
Watching frantically; morning noon and night
To see no food had passed the artists lips
And death would take them nicely without tricks   
I can’t remember ever being free 
My cage and I came together mysteriously
We seem to be the same thing
Starving came instinctively 
As last hunger artist I can’t resign
I have to see enlightenment one time
With or without people to observe
Even if I should die before my time alone

The World Ain'T Seen Superheroes Yet

This is nothing similar to a fairytale
Grossly not the packaging of an unwanted mail
Nothing close to a Kafkaesque display
It is FACT!!! On the head I hit the nail

If you're looking for heroes, don't go that far
You might wonder where in the world they are
We are the gratified ones, we've made the par
Look around, you got the super-duper star

Could superman overpower the masters on poetry side
Nor flash run extraordinarily fast in his mind
Ben 10 transform his feelings into written lines
And hulk evolve as poetry's mastermind?

You know the answers if you're not gazing for 'amateur'
We are supersonic... We are not caricatures
We are superiority... We re not immatures
We are superheroes... The best among living creatures

Go back and resurrect that dead pen of yours
Open your book and ink down your elevated thoughts
Speak your mind, Open your heart, don't give up
We were born to do this, We were born to rule the WORLD

Go and reclaim Glory!!!
WE ARE THE SUPERHEROES THEY AINT SEEN YET

The Burning Man

Rolling there on the ground
petrol soaked a burning man

I could not whisper a sound
him suffering a youtube death 

Sitting here quietly writing at my desk
what possible help could I give but Kafkaesque


Category : Tragic,Ironic,Funny,

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