The Joke | Faruk Buzhala

To waste time on books while you have a lot of other tasks to do,
To read, incessantly to read, in order to gain knowledge and finally see
That time is gone, lost among the writings of the dead
Who never invented the art of being happy!

I stand in front of the shelves with hundreds of books by well-known authors
 who dealt with the portraits of controversial people,
 people with vices, and various bad habits! 
Was it worthwhile to immortalize these figures
who gave examples and examples from human relationships
and made us take life served according to their imaginative way?

Books, a lot of books.
So many books and so little time to read them. (I do not remember who said that!)

I look at the bookshelf, 
It catches my eye and I read the titles:
The Financier,
Red and Black, 
Father Goriot, 
The Blind, 
The Grass,
Tips for Life,
The Diary of the Year of the Plague, 
The Devils,
The Divine Comedy,
Night,
Farewell to Arms,
Praise of Madness, 
Love in the Time of Cholera, 
Don Quixote of La Mancha,
The most beautiful of the worlds, etc., etc.
So much time lost in writing, so little time wasted in reading!

Wow, how many written books are on the shelves, covered by the dust of time?
How many manuscripts are waiting to come to light and be published?
Will they all survive time?

It has become a trend to publish books,
If there is nothing left to do write your autobiography,
because others then will read it
and will learn from you
how life is lived the way you lived it!

What, do you need knowledge? 
When you learn it from experience 
and copy-paste to others
without knowing that the meaning of all knowledge
lies in the books!

I stand in front of bookshelves and am filled with bitterness,
I knock them all down, I throw them away from the apartment,
I gather them up and spray them with gasoline,
Then I burn them.
I warm myself in the fire coming out of the books;
Eternal fire, the fire of the gods, Universal fire that disperses ether.
I think of the library of Alexandria, The Name of the Rose, Fahrenheit 451,
The fire with which burned at the stake Giordano Bruno,
the fire in which whole cities burned, 
the fire that burned and burned whole mountains, fire, fire, fire.

P.S.
I went through a spiritual crisis one more time!
I look at the books that stand on the shelves and
I’m glad they are still there!
I look at them one by one, reading the titles gradually 
until my eyes stop on one of them
as I read, letter by letter: T – H – E   J – O – K – E
Confused, I say to myself: Hey, this writer is still alive!

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©2023 Faruk Buzhala
All rights reserved

Faruk Buzhala…

…is a well-known poet from Ferizaj, Kosovo, writing in his mother-tongue, Albanian. He was born in 9 March 1968 in Pristina. He is the former manager and leader of “De Rada,” a literary association, from 2012 until 2018, and also the representative of Kosovo to the 100 TPC organization. In addition to poems, he also writes short stories, essays, literary reviews, traveltales, etc. Faruk Buzhala is an organizer and manager of many events in Ferizaj. His poems have been translated to English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Croatian and Chinese, and are published in anthologies. .

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The 2023 (Inter)National Poetry Month BeZine Blog Bash

Art: European Robin, pastels, ©2021 Tom Higgins

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