Károly Sándor Pallai 

Károly Sándor Pallai is Hungarian oceanist, historian of literature, poet, translator and editor. He holds a PhD in contemporary francophone literature. He’s a member of several scholarly and literary associations (Mauritius, France, United States, Australia, Colombia, Greece). He’s the founder and editor in chief of the international literary review Vents Alizés and of the publishing house Edisyon Losean Endyen. He’s a member of the editorial board of the Seychellois literary review Sipay.

He writes and publishes poetry in French, English, Creole, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, Kiswahili, Romanian, Tahitian and Turkish. He has published two poetry collections and a play (in French and English). In acknowledgement of his theoretical, poetical and editorial work, he was chosen among the "50 Young Hungarian Talents" by the La femme magazine. His translations have been published in books and reviews worldwide. He is the first Hungarian translator of several foreign languages (Sranan, Papiamento, Saramacca, Sarnami, Aukan, Seychellois-, Mauritian-, Haitian- and Guadeloupean Creole). His poems have been published in journals and anthologies worldwide (Tahiti, Haiti, United States, Northern Ireland, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, Philippines, Seychelles, Thailand, Hungary, England).

a marvelous hiatus

torture, brainwash, intimidation, systematic exploitation.

 you name it. we all have it in this world.

 who would pay me for my thoughts?

 who would pay me for thinking, for making others think, for teaching to be critical?

 the risk of not taking action is probably far greater than making a wrong decision.

fire ants  squel on my frontal lobe.

i contemplate the unfolding future in a silent, etiolated, emaciated, effulgent prayer.

a perching little fatty is sitting on a potty-chair like a nursery-school child.

his limbs tucked in the holes of the high chair, blazing in an obscene, reproachful way, his whole body shingin indecently.

this little old man radiates: a slovenly, toothless fissile material guiding us through this shattered world. holding a cigarette in his hand, i’m sure his hair has never seen a comb.

he’s bowing there in the church in that absurd, wheeled high chair, a shrunken adult.

this is not gonna work.

judging by the clothes dropped on the way towards the doors and windows, i guess that others have already set out.

they’ve already tried to lead us out from here, but this grotesque and nonsensical old man, smelling of earth, reminding us of our frailness, this piece of breathing flesh has gone beyond all bounds.

this fish-like glimpse, this body of collapsed atomic structure calls to our minds our disastrous shrinking, our end-oriented existence.

i’m not interested

a capitalist horn of plenty, a mendaciously sparkling canaan, a land of milk and honey reserved for the lucky few.

bleeding bells raging and raving with norhtern lights, pouring out as an expiatory sacrifice and a peace offering for the sins of this world.

our world struck by apoplexy.

injustice has become institutionalized, a genetic code, a second nature.

envy, domination, relativization of values. our world has become ripe for an all-destroying Flood, for a torrid global conflagration.

war marks and slits in the face, just like the so common everyday hatred, betrayal and emotional cannibalism.

this is the new age anthropophagy of the civilized societies.

torturing slowly, with western intelligence, eating the heart out.

we witness a new evolution, the distortion of the personality by wrath and vengefulness.

that’s what i’m thinking of every evening.

mornings are somewhat different.

today for instance i ate messily and stained the truthlessly promised, vacuously gleaming words with a steamingly hot, nauseating greasy sauce.

this was the fluid of enlightenment.

words have lost all their fake glint in this smudgy, stained dirt.

this was a moment of clash, the procession of all the dwarfish, lilliputian kingdoms of the earth.

a moment of relevation stuck between the interstices of the dirty, desacralized words.

i meditated on the reasons why permanence and stability weigh heavy on my mind.

i’m not interested in contentment and satisfaction.

or in the predictable, safe bits of reality.

 i care a lot more about deconsecrating and violating words and thoughts.

this was a moment of endless grace, succeeding in playing a trick on life that usually rams itself down our throat.

 i don’t care about conventional tranquility or beaten tracks.

 these are short-lived empires of dust.

i become weary and bored with them.

i opt for an unconditional libery of mind and soul, for a constructive mistrust towards the future.

out of the shadow

to Josephat Torner

being albino: defected melanin metabolism.

not a definition, not an equation.

only the beginning of vulnerability, of the escalation of mortal discrimination, of deep-rooted superstition.

 social exclusion, prejudice, isolation, rejection.

 a wheelbarrow of distress and misfortune.

 brothers and sisters ostracized, human beings brutally exiled, mutilated, babies assassinated.

 these are histories of opprobrious dehumanization, white-skinned stigmatization in the fulminant, defiantly graceful birthplace of humanity.

crouching in the shadow, hiding from the unmerciful killer: the sun, hastened to cover the disdainful and heinous deeds by lowering its token obduracy.

albinos fearing for their lives in a pale and ghosted land. in the shadow of the blistering, scorching penetration of ultra-violet rays.

why do we deprive people of the quiescent visage of hope, precipitating souls into the perditional darkness of irredeemable depths?

 albinos seeking protection from the horrific practices of witchdoctors, fetid and putrescent lies, carcinogenic exposure.

 each death is an acidiferous, corroding, bone-shredding kiss of Judas on the contagious, decomposing body of humanity.

let there be a word in remembrance for the dismembered, tortured, cast-away lives, for the graceful, rising souls of uninvestigated murders.

 a word in honour of the men and women, the proclaimants of wondrous daybreaks, mountaineers, freedom fighters, activists, leaping towards soulful tides of gold-cased futures.