I walked your streets.
Clean.
Silent.
Beautiful.
Yet beneath marble order,
blood remembers.
Zurich smiled.
The Limmat whispered.
It knows the names
money forgets.
Here, gold arrives
without questions.
Here, crime washes its hands
and calls it neutrality.
No empire of land.
No empire of soil.
An empire of vaults.
Of silence.
Lake Zurich wept.
“We are rich,” it said,
“but our wealth stands
on borrowed bones.”
Drug lords rest here.
Murderers sleep well.
Stolen futures
earn interest.
Perhaps you had no choice.
Perhaps survival chose you.
But Machiavelli warned:
Power fed by shadow
must answer the dark.
He who lives by the sword,
dies by the sword.
What is taken in secrecy
returns in time.
With witnesses.
There was an old lady from Zurich,
Whose husband was garrulous and rich,
He bragged about his new boat,
That it had a steel-like coat,
The boat sank due to an unseen glitch.
May 21, 2023.
A gust of icy air blasts
the cold into my bones,
tugging at my knees with
hollow, aspirating groans,
making numb my cheeks,
whirling 'round my waist;
pulling at me thither-ward
down cobbled streets in haste.
Thick snowflakes lightly flurry
soft upon my lashes,
squinting hard, I blink away
the blinding, frozen ashes.
Presently, I chance upon
a steepled, stony schloss,
whence I knew myself beyond
the bounds of Hotzestrasse.
All around me, strangers rush
to unfamiliar places;
swiftly stepping, spinning past
with stern, impatient faces.
I sidle down a sleepy street,
apart the harried crowd,
into the quiet entrance
of a quaint café I bowed.
A corner cuckoo ticks away
the time with listless ease,
whiling away the morning;
an anxious spirit to appease.
Rich and steamy mochas
warm away the frosty chill
of this melancholy trav'ler
reflecting on the wintry still.
OR
What I Learned on the Web Today
The whorehouse of the future
At least in Zurich’s mind
Is a bunch of car park cubicles
For hookers and their kind
This series of sex-box places
Where clients will drive into
Are on a 1st come-1st served basis
That will keep them from your view
Town folks by the way
Had this to say
We can’t rid the town of hookers
So we must learn to control it
And to keep out creepy lookers
We will also then patrol it
With the women by their boxes
There is no lost travel times
And that means these red-light foxes
Can collect a few more dimes
We’re just thinking of the ladies
And of their clientele
And a little of the citizens
Who within this town now dwell
If ever you’re in Zurich
And you need to park your car
Don’t stop where there are red lights
If there, you’ve gone too far
Mihaly was a saint of sorts;
he improved, with his search for understanding,
the lives of so many yearning writers;
the lame in spirit heard his Zen like words.
He could not have imagined the journey
From Hungary to Zurich to Chicago
A glimpsed mandala led to the heart of the impossible image
How did he learn to trust the flow?
The Rhine flowing down to the North Sea
May start as some minute spring
At the confluence of the gravity of water and earth.
And those then who have cast their nets into that sea
May bring in treasures not found in the business of cities.
At the first sighting,the image seemed hazy
Then the words began to flow like current through a wire.
Like a river cutting slowly through rocks of marble,
like an unknown sage from the Himalyan Alps
who had kissed the lips of his muse more than once
As she floated like a ghost, no,more like music
Tracing concentric spheres into the air
Till the universe was singing.
What was most human was his appetite,his love.
Touch the hem of his garment,follow your flow
Cut your path through the hard darkness until you find
The sunlit sea you were made to swim in
like a fish in its own sphere
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