Two poems by Janos Ross

GERMAN WINGS I cross the Pyrenees From München Drinking Côte du Rhône, Famille Perrin Dos chapeaux Strike the Rotkäppchen Passport American Not so far from Mont Pèlerin I hesitate to say certain names in this context Lufthansa, pacific Luftwaffe Now a decade on saw one of its pilots Reignite it Tragic terror in the Alps An image so civilized, it was almost a caliphate Barricaded the door from inside Pushed the tiller into nosedive A fratricide of Europeans, And among the deadliest. Then it was civilization’s awkward memory Of sacrifice, archaic patrimony
2022 on Sunday the Chancellor will address the Nation Not disease this time, but war and energy He will get down to brass tacks Moving parts, heavy artillery Deployed to Poland to attack West German Social Democrat Hopes to sever the Russian Communist capillary Heil History! It repeats, it rhymes A so-called socialist mayor‘s Coming out ceremony Atlantic officialdom‘s Hamburg G20 He bludgeoned adolescents and students With men drawn from across the Federal Republic Mounted horses, robocops How Hanseatic Will they ever learn? I ask But I’m masked Vaxxed, taxed and muffled So I tip my hat, remember a Spaniard, and raise my glass from the Bay of Biscayne To one who stopped the advance: Staline, à ta santé!
UKRAINE SPAIN Ukraine, Spain, oxycodone, lidocaine Our coronation in pain May I ask if you are triple vaxxed Back and bikini waxed For our app Now requires cell sap Facial confirmation Through which our brain is made plain The face is the newest human organ Replacing genitalia With all attendant shame And Charles V, though exiled in Bahrain Rides the U-Bahn unmasked indecent, insane He begs for change Takes rent from Iberia to Peru Barely pauses to whisper “thank you” For underground Kleingeld, which is his Klein-Venedig.
Charles V’s face is warped His head is a soft typewriter of flesh The jaw is the spacebar, the eyes are antennae This human face has a lineage From Lithuania’s great war with the Teutons To consolidation under the banner Felix Austria Nube World order achieved through sexual selection But far from perfection It yielded horrid deformities, male crones And finally divinity in mediocrity Our human face as such dates only to 1997 The eyes are by then vestigial, and transubstantiated As if by opus Dei But in reality due to digitization’s induced organic decay Abre los ojos repeated in English A Spanish actress plays herself as beauty simulated in the year 2147, Madrid And then plays her role again in Hollywood Dream-image thought stabilized, projected how many times we don’t know The man’s fantasy, his virtual heaven He follows Disney’s deep-frozen life extension
This is our real reality: An actor plays himself twice as president in Kiev He is probably in Poland Holds forth in California, Tel Aviv, Washington on the screen The House calls for escalated, endless war The bloated bodies pissed themselves in the cauldron Our faces appear at least twice, are reduced to gore.