Poems - JP Melville

Caravanserai – Dawn Creeps in Through the Mist 2000+   jp melville <song play chris isaak cover london grammar wicked game> Caravanserai, sleeping above where the camels once slept. A stone building with wide, tall archways, hosting travellers who now have nowhere to go but toward visiting the past, worlds not yet wholly versions of Dupont and EveReady and Nylon, yet celebrating New Year on December 31 st . Odd how we travel from airport to airport, from faucet to faucet that turn clockwise to open, from white granular salt that pours to white granular salt that pours... Yet we long for distinction in our lives, to say that we have been there and done that, there which is where we are not and that which is not this. And we try to do this by travelling, fucking a no one, and staying in places like those where camels once slept. Caravanserai… Where, I wonder, is the stench of manure in the cracks...

You Asked About Responsibility forever date jp melville Though not really a poem, I thought you might like to read this… friend... Cold November rain falls early this Sunday morning.   No schedule.   No duties.   Awake before the light begins to rise in the dawn.   Coffee steaming before me.   A cigarette burning, which I inhale, hold, and exhale slowly.   Then sip my black coffee.   I have a candle burning so that I can write these notes.   I listen to the patter of the raindrops on the roof, in the naked branches of the trees, in the dark puddles outside on the ground.   Also, I hear voices from the bazaar, maybe a stone throw from this house, across the walls of two compounds.   Food and trade continue, some things never change.   Azerbaijan loses her Shusha and the Karabakh mountains to the Armenians, borders change, once people here had electricity.   Now, people must eat, war, no war, ceasefire o...

Amniotic Darkness 2019 and old Imishli   jp Was it war once here? Am I that war? Drops splatter in the dust, bring softness to the evening. Thick air becomes light, even as the sun drops below the horizon. I sit on a veranda. I have showered. Smoking a cigarette, watch mud form, watch a chicken huddle under a plank of wood. We hide from the rain. We watch leaves of quince trees shiver with pleasure. Landlady brings me a meal of cheese: sliced cucumber, sliced bell peppers, bread, stuffed tomatoes. stuffed eggplant. stewed lamb… potato and yoghurt and tea. I snuff my cigarette. I enter the house to eat. I sit where landlady has placed the meal for me. At the head long table. Attended by none but me. Eat like a king in an empty castle. Absurd, this coming to live in another country. Absurd, this believing that one is welcome. I am not sold in. To be polite, I devour all that is on my plate as though watched f...

Full On War 2001 Years Later jp melville It is just about here that you would think that I would get back to Imishli.   And I do.   But not for long.   There is a call from Buck, the guy they call regional director.   Works out of New York.   So guess where I end up.   Yup.   New York.   But just long enough to get fired from my post.   I arrived in the city in the evening.   Into the office at eight in the morning.   Fired by eight thirty.   Fired by a guy who is not paid for his job.   Just sort of always been around.   Which got my mind going on conspiracy theory.   Actually, I had been doing the surfing on the internet from Baku.   International Rescue Committee run by Cherne and pals, friends with Haliburton.   The gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which is about the only reason we have Canadian troops in the land of the Khyber Pass.   Why on earth would Canadian babies be ...