Shattered Silence

SHATTERED SILENCE

Copyright © 2019 Paul Zeppelin.

Cover Credits: Mary Anne Capeci

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-8620-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-8622-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-8621-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019916754

iUniverse rev. date: 10/30/2019

Contents

Preface

Dawn Poured Its Rays into My Room

I Need a Pair of Wings

The Night Has Opened Its Umbrella

Empty Pages

I Carved My Rosy Dreams

I Cast My Nets upon the World

Cherchez La Femme

Bacchanalia

I Brought Her a Bouquet

Another Trojan Horse

Artful Uncertainty

A Dungeon for Imperfect Lives

I Often Pray in Empty Chapels

Her Life’s Dried Out Riverbeds

I Breathe the Air of Glee

Homage to Eugene Ionesco

Homage to D. M. Thomas

Homage to Beethoven

Homage to Perlman

Homage to Japan

Homage to Thieves and Whores

I’m Leaving Earth

I Cannot Play a Second Violin

I Hold the End of a Rope

I Need a Shrink

Ode to Love

Ode to Nice

I Missed the Fork

I Miss the French Riviera and Provence

I Miss the Heat

I Miss You, Abigail

I Love My Solitude

I Love the Movies of Tomorrow

I Built a House from a Dream

I Loved My Nanny

I Left the Tower of Despair.

I Left a Bitter Message

I Live in My Tomorrow

I Hope to Be Around for A While

He Slowly Drags his Cart

Goodbye…

Forgive me, Mom and Dad

My Life Abruptly Changed

I Leave this Bedlam

Forgive Me, Love

I Left My Parachute Behind

I Listened to the Rain

The Night Fell Quickly on the Pond

I Morphed into an Owl

The Guillotine of History

A Silver-Washed Moonlight

Eternity for Writers

Our Platoon Marched

I Learned to Dream

I am Breaking the Ice

Opium of Fame

Homo Homini Lupus Est

I Lent my Soul to Badness

Graveyards of Hopes

I Cast Away My Anger

I Lost My Diamond

I Lost a Password

We Longed for Glee

I Look in Silence at the Gold of Foliage

A Crescent Bashfully Hides

I Loaned my Loneliness to Others

I Lecture to Myself

I Lost My Last Illusion

C’est la Vie

I Breathe

I Built a Cabin in the Woods

A Bud Unfurls in just a Day

A Crystal Shrine

A Sketch

I Asked my Death to Dance

I Closed My Eyes

I Locked the Door into My Heart

A Blissful Ploy

A Farewell Swig

A Departing Train

A Bad Dream

Estranged

Hemmingway

I Love My Neighbor

A Cruel Hurricane

Along the River of Despair

A Bird of Hope

Enlightened Failure

Don’t Rush to Bury Me

Eludes those Cracking Whips

Eternal Adolescence

Don’t Try to Fly

A Day Before

As Punishment for Debts

A Drifter

A Cube of Sugar

From Truth to Lies

History isn’t a Teacher

An Empty Terminal of Love

And Wilted Red Roses’ Petals

Eternal Tango

At Times

Farewell, Dear Sun

Graffiti

Don’t Torture Me

Good Wars

Downfall

Ascended Spirit

Lively Equilibrium

Don’t Spin the Globe

Don’t Lose Your Head

Don’t Try to Fly

The Infantile Desire

As a Pinch of Salt

Don’t Strew Your Salt

War Is Hell

Farewell, my Gallant Matador

I Am a Verses-Weaver

Don’t Open Yet The Gate

Far Back, As I Can Remember

French Crepe

Another Requiem

Almost Iambic Sonnet

Above My Melancholic Eyes

The Olden Drawbridge is Set Apart

Waterfalls of Vanity

A Bitter Teardrop

A Blindfolded Goddess

A Boring Carnival

Arbeit Macht Frei

An Etude

I Left Behind My Cheating Church

A Gift

A Guided Ride

A Burning Red-Hot Grille

I Looked for Dad

Hell Lived in Me

A Celebration of Suspense

I Can’t Embrace

I Found My Old Album in the Attic

I Entered Twice

Horizon

I Chose a Gluttony Canteen

A Breezy Shade

We Tried to Love Somebody Else

Amnesia of Fate

A Cross to Bear

The Countdown

A Choice of Salt or Honey

A Gypsy Lady Holds My Hand

All-Forgiving Death

A Beast Four-Footed

A Life Devoured

I Am In You

No One Can Circle Squares

Between the Moonlit Walls

Along with Aesthetic Deafness

A Fallen Angel Waited

Have Faith in Science

A Casual Bloodbath

A Child That Never Had Enough

A Confession

Entropy

Eternity Won’t Ever Say Goodbye

Eccentric Comfort of my Days

Art Is an Unknown Land

Archival Files

Ambiguities

I Grab the Falling Knives

Downhill to Dwell

At Night

At Eighty-three

As if We Never Parted

A Bugle Playing

I Left Naiveté Behind

I Clothed You with a Rain

Emotional Intelligence

I Am a Wolf

A Cup of English Tea

I Took a Redeye Flight

Angry Man

Fate

Enigma of the Future’s Past

Eternal Tango

Ethereal Wisdom

Etude

Hey, Cabby

Faustian Pact

Farewell, my Gallant Matador

A Day is Just An Exhibition

The Crisp Boneyards

And Visions Passed Away

An Exit Sentence

Down the River

George Heard my Prayer

Good and Evil

Give Us a Happy Hour

Give me Your Heart

Gertrude’s Roses

Futile Errands

Friday Night

First Dance

Along the Salty Breeze

Obsession with Mortality

Ambiguities

Farewell to Happiness

Farewell, Accordion

Adorned with a Fruitless Glitz

Farewell, My Strife

As Uninvited Guests

He Finally May Touch his Stars

Greece

Eternity for Writers

Enlightened Failure

He Slowly Drags his Cart

Four Silhouettes of Horses

A Mirror

Anguish

Ode to Love

Four Apocalyptic Horses

No One Hears the Cries

I Hate this Rain

I Borrowed Glee

I Ceased the Rain

I had to Bite the Bullet

House of Cards

I Begged the Hurricane

Life isn’t Idle with the Bitters

Orgasms of History Were Faked

My Epitaph

Epitaph

I Hover in My Dreams

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

I have here dealt with the wall of Taboos which

silenced our thoughts, emotions, and aspirations.

I hope my poetry is deeply "interior and personal-

which the reader recognizes as his own" as

Salvatore Quasimodo once said.

Preface

I’ve known Paul Zeppelin for almost sixty years since 1961. At first, I met him as a painter. The remarkable thing at the time was that Paul, like no other, developed a special relationship between the hue and the semantics of his paintings. The most ordinary objects, such as a tin can or a burned match, turned on his canvas straight into a dramatic and often tragic story. At least that’s how the viewer perceived his pictures and rewarded the painter with fascination and deservedly popularity.

Over the years, Paul Zeppelin developed his art into ever broader genres. Thus, his relationship found in painting between the elemental (hue) and complex (meaning, subject, meaning) was transformed into the relationship between the tone and the statement in his poems, which Paul wrote in recent years in English.

So now the musical, the tone has taken on the role of the former hue, and the sound lately made sense. The power of this poetic collection is a seamlessly interwoven fabric of sound and meaning that leads us into the world of faith and doubt, of peace and war, of death and life, despair and hope…

Zeppelin’s poems must be heard from the first row and then read by the eyes.

Boris Schapiro

Boris Schapiro is the author of Соло на флейте, Metamorphosenkorn, Ein Tropfen Wort, Aufgezeichnete Transzendenz, and 21 other literary works in German and Russian.

Dawn Poured Its Rays into My Room

I watched my nightly dreams in gray;

Dawn poured its rays into my room,

I grabbed my always ready broom

And quickly swept them right away.

I wished to find in the darkness,

Not in the blinding light,

The truth which rarely sparkles

Under the starless night.

However, in the morning of a day,

When coffee is the eloquence of life,

When daring winds are on the way,

I seek a pearl of wisdom in my strife.

My soul is coldly soaked.

I raised my trembling voice

In the hostile, piercing rain.

The trees are still uncloaked,

I really had no other choice,

But funnel life into the drain.

I try to find a panacea for this rust,

While life acts like a stubborn horse

Without a saddle, spurs and reins;

I live in mediocrity, inhale the dust;

I hardly breathe, my anger soars,

And clogs my dog-tired veins.

Like bees in search of fitting hives,

I’m discovering the arteries of lives.

I Need a Pair of Wings

I need a pair of wings

Burned with the sun,

I play the strings,

My fingers run,

I spur my horse,

Along my verse.

Nobody sings

The songs I wrote;

I need a pair of wings

To keep my poetry afloat.

I’d like to know:

Am I a chicken or a hen?

What if I am a nasty crow?

Who cares, we’re old friends,

I didn’t notice who went first

Into the dreadful lions’ den

To shake few friendly hands,

To see whose bubbles burst.

I want to dance with you,

I would prefer in heaven,

The bird of hope is blue,

I am an old black raven.

The Night Has Opened Its Umbrella

The night has opened its umbrella.

Bright stars swam in my wine,

And Elgar’s Opus 85 for cello

Embraced this weary soul of mine.

The bed was awfully cold without you;

The wind was softly singing lullabies,

The rain drummed something blue,

I tried, but couldn’t close my eyes.

I tried to live with hope and love;

I used to hide my pains and fears,

Even my angel-savior far above

Missed warnings of those years.

Old willows wept with silver leaves,

The days were clouded by griefs.

The starry nights were long and dark

Reflected in the river of my tears.

You walked away and took my heart,

Despair descended on my cheers.

The blade