ODA ANACONDA (collection)

ODA ANACONDA

Collection sep 2025

BLESSING

I chiselled this poem
out into stone

laborious work
but it
felt worth it

wrote the whole thing
with a stylus cutting
markd into
clay tablets

spray painted
a whole stanza
in plain view
on the side of a building
in the middle of the night

daubed
    it in blood
desecrating a flag

keyed it in electronically
pressed send and
believed it
     published instantly
bouncing across the ether

whispered it into
your soft
        ear

typed it out with suddenly
agile fingers
         observed it flow
across your body

taking
       it
       to the house

point of truth where
you are at your most receptive

most fully conscious
of how
       transcience here
comes into play

poem
   be both blessed and
doomed
to disappear

****

HONEY

do not presume
to tell me
what
is forbidden

is the sky
forbidden?
the sea
the Sun
you

yourself
    forbidden?

are all the things
in your book
of prescriptions
             ultimately forbidden

what of honey
is that too,
forbidden

bees may sting
but the make it freely

as is the case
with honey, your honey

it is the sting
itself that makes it what it is
defines it as honey

and so please
before you
close the gates
shut
   the hive
lay the mines
      string the wire

as a matter of gentility do
tell me what is forbidden
point to
     what is forbidden
in all this honey

that I might discover
taste
    and judge

decide for myself

       ****             

UNTIL

poetry is
the easy way

simplicity itself
line

of least
resistance

a quantum wave
of words
about to
flow

no huge
necessity this
be

in any structured
shape, size
or form

any
particular direction

in your head
mon lecteur acad-
                 emique
length
     of line
geometry of page
                slice and dice
of caesura
stanza

and here
we have a bitch of a poem
that refuses to budge

your fingers hovering above
the page
      a picture of frustration
portrait of
inertia

nothing ever seemed
so impossible
      until it didn’t

nothing even
   beginning to flow until
it would
not stop

poetry is difficult until
it isn’t

poetry
   is no way
easy

until it is

until
(out of nowhere)
it writes itself

****

AND NOW YOU DON’T

here we are
yet again

tooth and nail
battling upstream
insane in our search
for
   forever narrowing

until
   as always

the river
swallows itself
contrives
        to disappear

****

AT LAST

at last
I got a handle
on an old memory

that semi-detached double-
storey house of ours
in the middle of
the cul-de-ssc
leading to the cemetery

how I wanted to
simply fly through
the glass windows
    of my bedroom
upstairs

fly around briefly before
fire stage two and
full astral projection
and me
all of seven and desperate
to be a miracle

create my own parable
as i zoom hither
and thither

but something in
the room, the Sun, the
sky, the clouds,
the silicon they
made
   the glass from

killed the tiny
shaman in me
there and then

only much later
would I be
dragged out by some
awesome power
to
  circumnavigate
my own tiny special part
of the
other side of the Universe

these dots in my brain
becoming giant
and
    dwarf stars

collecting, connecting,
linking
      one

to all

at last
to get

a handle whilst
still
   time

to re-
live

think
my way
through them

“”””

THE ODDS

threw a
Hail Mary

what are
the odds
       historically

it be caught for six points
or fly to the Moon
on the wings
of Apollo?

less or
more
    always a risk factor

must check those sacred pages
in my father’s manifesto
of social disconnection

great-grandchild of
some famine immigrant
sold a dream story
of opportunity

progeny of some child
of Africa transported
across the Atlantic
chained
       in the hold
to work
those prosperous fields

out there in the touch zone
holding the victory ball
or still waiting
          receiver by trade
and set
to receive

the crowd ecstatic that we
have a
Sitting Bull ambush, have
a Wild Bill
          shootout

have some music demigod
to serve the half-time feast

red zone
hell hole

too far ahead in
space and time
for me
      to ascertain with
degree of
certainty

the shifting nature of this game
cowboys, packers,
miners, and most
typically
      raiders, chiefs and
buccaneers

see in its logic
          all we need to know
must
     now envision

the spectacle
         telling its truth, making

its
     ambitions clear

****

NOTE TOWARDS A SNOWFLAKE APPRECIATION SOCIETY

Why should I not
appreciate a snowflake

(such a lovely
devil
   in that detail)

melting
on my tongue, between
my fingers

each one
unique

cold,
    precise

I guess one
might argue

superior in
every way to
a poem

even
a poem about
snowflakes
for that matter

****

OR SO YOU BELIEVE

déshabillé
(or so you believe)

whereas I would say
too much is divulged
subtext is showing

paradigm is exposed
to the ruination of your
                                  reputation
need to cover up
       heads to
spin

though my own stock-
in-trade be
scarcely golden

seems like you may just
have rushed too pre-
cipitously into
some bad
media alchemy

and now
      are looking high and low
under every bombed structure
for each
    and every collateral

making such a racket to
deflect our eyes
           from the hypocrisy

the place
reduced to a desert,
carnage
            beyond words

sad that what might have
saved poetry
        bent out of shape to
sustain
    the war industry

defend
        death’s exceptionality

make the case for a rapture,
thing so sickly sweet

will
     annihilate the need for
theology
         morality, humanity

basic kindness and love
the species professed to hold dear

“”””
CHORD

I imagine
there is a script in my head

the page not yet in being
crying out for
birth by improvisation

wanting to go wherever
it wishes to go

meanwhile in the forest
Puck never foresaw King Crimson
never anticipated
the marriage
of Robert
and Toyah
Toyah and Robert

when these stories
                        tell themselves
they believe
brain states but pen dictates

something in the ether
flutes, strings or
maybe
     an eerie mellotron
singing, cross-
pollinating

I don’t know
whence or why all this comes

flows first
        like a trickle, then
a river flowing
through a capital city

but it comes
it comes
              turns time to
its tune

and you
     as always an inspiration
to me

serenading me silently
but inwardly I dance, have
no choice
           but to

your body
          raw rock and roll, incipient
heavy medal

your mind
Mingus, Davis jazz solo

your voice
   the missing solution to
every unsolved ancient philosophical
problem

every genre
zone and miracle  twist
in the plot, jaw
dropping moment

leaving no niche
left uncovered, hoard unfound
across that sweet topography

and every
molecule fibre
              crying out, imploring you
to fuse
with my mythology
jump aboard my allegory

become my inner metaphor
 
in the confused progressions of this symphony

the very Devil’s chord lurking
I do believe

“”””
IN THE MORNING

feeling buoyant
energized

thought myself
on my last legs

looks like
I was wrong

and so
many things to love
about a
new day
about the morning

let’s
take it
from the top

I love so
many things
in the morning

I love the smell
of Robert Duvall
telling me he loves
the smell of napalm
in the morning

alongside a river
that winds through shadow
to the dark heart of man

I love
fire and death in
my morning newspaper

nothing like
a dose of savagery and misery
with my bacon, eggs  and
pancakes
       toast and tea

but to
mellow out a little

I love my songs soft and
sentimental, expertly crooned
with Sinatra panache

catching me by surprise
as they drift across the airwaves

calming
      me down         straightening
                                 me out

making me
          comfortable, approachable

deadly in my
              sublime treachery

like Garbo, the greatest
of all double agents, quiet (and
marvellously) mad
magician
          of Allied spies

woke one morning
      concocted the most
delightfully outrageous fantasy

to deceive
    Hitler’s Reich
               lead up the garden path

do something for humanity
in the morning
             overlord of
all mornings

****

DARWIN 4

I like
to think of myself
of a Victorian naturalist
shot out
      of a cannon
into the future
through
space and time into
distant and
bizarre
      Goldilocks Zone

to find
myself
     taking a stroll like
Imperial British Gentlemen

walking on the
surface of an
alien planet
they
happened to
name after me

freshly equipped with
all my conversions

retractable legs, compound
eyes, downloaded intelligence
and full
hover capabilities
carrying me across the
needle-spine badlands,
the acid seas and lakes
of mercury

looking for
the planet’s raw nerve,
scouring every niche
for signs of
life, impending
intelligence,
hints of the biological

foundations of
new civilizations and
their
     inevitable cities
of deep, incandescent pain.

****

THERE IS NO

there is no
poetry to survive
the six million

poetry dies
a death
each genocide

spicy left-leaning
socialist philosopher
from Frankfurt
made that
     point with
finality and
killer succinctness

no landscape
ever worth writing about
once
    the bombers have been

tanks
   churned their way through

ploughing through fields
that never
can
   be ploughed again

until
    that horror, that pain
burned
    into memory

is
  thing lost to time
can no longer remain

****
ARACHNE

I implored
the goddess
for an advance
to cover my needs

willfully mishearing
she proffered advice regarding
my need for brevity,
to come to the point

write the scenes
in strict succession
creating characters
who could not
fail
   to convince

and thus, my fingers
immediately responded
inspired divinely

exploded at once
across the keyboard
worlds
    apart from my usual plod

pinging away, spinning tales
rich in revolutionary output
soon impinging
upon a critical mass

whereupon
    I dreamt such

a perfectly sound and logical
left-brained dream

much scissor snip snap
and fabric flowing
output growing

and the clothes by no
means invisible but
fit for an Emperor

consummately tailored
yet desperately clinging

whilst
     the goddess acknowledging
my supremacy in
the very shape
    ot this transformation
ss I
rappel, abseil, become
finest
      weaver of treachery

suspended by
the divine strength of silk,
my silk

and you now dangling, reader,
hanging on for dear life.

****

CAVALIER

let them
bulld a chapel

weave corsages, prim
nosegays

see
where my finger points
out into the distance, just
on the horizon, vague yet
stark
   beginnings of a scaffold

yet this is
just presentment, this you
can relegate  Shakespearean style
to the vagaries of a bad dream

Lucasta’s posies have
little surface connection with
a lunge into hedonism,
living
     by the sharpness of
rapier, dagger,
long sword

which words
    sst themselves, deliver their
own bitter, toxic,
raucous fruit

out there forces
starting small, becoming titanic

great the heart that
survives this ice, amidst
all this
      cacophony,
      yields pandamonium

****

CYPRUS

something boiling in
the water
                   off
the coast
              of Cyprus

a gorgeous monster
created from foam

lethal  one kiss
of kisses

the beauty of which, wonder
of wonders that
love goddess,

simply
         destroyed me

****
CURVATURE

wholly complicit
she

observes how the light
dapples her desk

take a
counter to her
and
she will not
stop ticking

good sign!

neat how
just a word
from her physics Professor
can break this reverie
bring her
back to reality (so-
called)

him within which
expounding at length
on the cast-iron
laws of
repulsion, attraction;

the sheer number
of white-hot articles published
hourly, daily,
emanating
out of this machine

testament to how
slowly the Universe
has slowed down
(no quick
       big crunch less
than than
lovingly speaking)

still locked
and loaded, explosive,
                   keen on expanding

whilst the warmth
of that afore obliquely
hinted at
      solar radiation

runs up her arms
pours down her neck

leaving her
         ripe for anything

feeling never before so
cute and
astute, philosophically awake

ready to
deal with dark energies,
dark matter
across
    whatever distance

strip
back that veil

trace (her
very first blueprint)

the soul of her curvature,
all curvature
    as it makes its way

****

LESS THAN FINE

wanted to write a
sexy poem
very
sexual

but the ink
prematurely ejaculated
shot out of my pen

wanted to a write a
very scary poem
ultimate scare

but the ink froze
my blood curdled
as it
    hit my brain

wanted to write a
very sentimental poem
terribly sad

but the
page got fluffy
all
   of a sudden
out of nowhere
went all
soft toy on me

didn’t want to
write an
elegy, my
elegy

a poem
on death
but you
twisted my arm
persuaded me I should

promising  me
you would give me
the perfect
last line

all those last lines of my own
though by
no means hopeless
less
   than fine

****

APOLLO

rocket
to the Moon

rocket
saying Hi, dropping
into my
back yard

bringing my own
private star, billion
degree
       Sun

same rocket
rocket
men
    rode to the Moon

(bouncing, buggying around
scenic drive
      one small
step for man)

same as the one that
took out my house, my
tiny lawn

like the eggs on the stove
I was cooking when
it came
       to pay
a visit, pay
its respects

popping, exploding in
that red-hot thermonuclear pan

I was
well and truly Sun god fried

****
CRYPTIC

rearranged the furniture
in my head
  (a few dry walls
had to knock out)

started to resemble
a mausoleum

which
so startled me
ended up
forgetting entirely
about my bed

and how and why
ended up in
the first place
fighting with this allegory

but did sleep
and collided with
all I had
moved and misplaced
throughout
         my dream

in dream
    no GPS no
proximity scream

things as they present themselves
could hardly be
more cryptic

****

ORIGIN STORY

I have totally
equipped this poem
for survival

to be a
lean,
mean
break-
dancing machine

sharp in tooth
incredibly soft in paw entirely.

****

IN AN IDEAL WORLD

fishing
    for jellyfish

wouldn’t know
how to start

unless
common sense dictate

candy rod
             sugar sinker

gelatinous hook
baited with
            (in an
ideal world)

strawberry cream and
vanilla custard

****
ZAPIRO

it’s no paranoia
just
bad fractals

not a tad of alien malfeasance
behind those clouds

focus
   won’t you

be like the Sun itself
passing through
a magnifying glass

observing
how a piece of paper
flapped in Parliament
(Parliament
of Parliaments)
might cause the wind
to howl
through streets shut down

a bad time idea
whose time is here

and now
only the anointed
wish to be
associated with it

loyal to
this final state
of secure being

iron wire and
tape spinning

nothing like it
even if your
paranoia run rampant

nothing in your
mind could be more off-beam

****
VISITATION

Had a bad dream. A stinker.

Dionysus, Apollo
moving in
as next
door neighbours

tightest of brothers
bitterest of rivals

neatly trimmed
the hedges between them
swarming with vipers

and me
in my own garden
drinking posh tea
Ambrosia flavoured

when
     at their joint house party
episode war erupted
after guests
spoke brazenly
           reacted ill-advisedly

blows, shots
exchanged, heavenly dactylic
style of sibling fighting

and all caught as collateral
in a disciplined rush
to
   escape to high ground
live to tell the story

and me
waking from this dream
finding myself
worse off
    plunged into another

hated, loved
by the gods

lost
    at sea, shipwrecked unless
forever sailing

no sight of land
just the great
            fiction of Elysium  Hades, Olympus

eternal wine-dark sea.
   
****

TROIS

the telepath writes haiku
always leaving the last line
blank

to be frank

**

let me use
sign language
to express

what words of desire
lack the feel for

short on touch

**
in the sea of irony
only the humorless
                     drown

elect to
sink

rather than swim

****

BY A THREAD

my poem
is running
with the wolves

running
from the dogs

poems
always seem
to end up
chased into the forest
running from the dogs

sheltering
beneath the tall trees
trees stocked
with good wood

springy, workable,

chop/chop
                  /chop

and there you have it
a gibbet born of craftsmanship
set to hang

unless
      we cut out the middleman
let the trees themselves
do the culling, catching
chasing

me meanwhile
so desperate to
deflect
    win hearts and minds
counter-persuade
them

   I am repentant utterly
reborn to turn
over a new leaf

doing my best to change things
before the last line closes

leaves us
   between turnstiles
frozen in limbo

hanging
      by a thread, by
a single thread hanging

****

CANOPY

catch me
in the treetops

dodging
the attack butterflies

buzzing out
of character like
angry 109 Messerschmitts (someone
having stirred up
their nest to a frenzy of
National Socialist fervor)

below the canopy
burnt out hulks
civilizations scrapyarded

threatening the promise
of sacred, peaceful,
untroubled,
          no bumps
in the night sleep

parachutes
opening formally, things
mushrooming with
a wide radius

dreams as thick as dead leaves
as the last days of Northern Autumn
everywhere you look
littering the forest floor

“”””
NILE LESSON

I am doing my level best
to teach the art of poetry
to the Queen of the Nile

knowing that
the slightest pedagogical
mistake might turn
my body into
a pincushion for arrows

and so
words hang back, prove0
extraordinarily reluctant

stick in my throat
like fat scarab beetles

even as
a real, intrepid scarab
attempts to
  cross the palace floor
for which gross violation
and fatal impropriety

she does catch
    and crack it open
its
  carapace
being no match

and me left
thinking, wondering
if there be
a metaphor here
to elucidate
    for her desired
edification

but then
when (Isis-inspired)
I ask her to regale me
with list
   upon list
of words whose sound she loves

those lethal eyes dance

her voice
goes gold filigree

mind
    rises to the moment
as if
   a thing of fine silver
housed in bluest
lapis-lazuli

is all, she is all,
softest of waves
about
   to crash on the shore after
crossing the Mediterranean

I am, for my sins,
trying my utmost
to teach
      the art of poetry
to the Queen of the Nile

****
FIRST GEAR

making hot
stuff with you

raises
my pain threshold

lowers my centre of gravity

tunes me up, every piston
pushing perfectly,
like
    a twelve cylinder engine

a portrait of road
holding, fuel-injected precision,
as soon as you get me
out of first gear

****

PROFESSOR MOONSHINE

was wearing
my best strip-searched
human face
instant guide
to my moral integrity
goodness of my nature

philosophizing
at the turnstile

life
death
Heaven Hell
United City

activating my consciouness
Earth watch, star radar

derby match floodlight
bathing the stadium

sky wheeling in time lapse
as it got to
penalty shootout

even as Sputnik
circles, Eagle as landed
space roce
      whizzes by

long time long time
(unless already on Mars
conspiracy theory) we
all
   believe we saw

boys shot from sunny Florida
racing in silver dune buggies
back
fron the Sea of Storms
bouncing in that gravity
towards the Sea of Tranquility

****

    ACCORDINGLY

this poem
(if you can call it that)
has been prescribed
for the safety of us all
in the interests
of National Security

no one may according
duplicate, disseminate, read,
repeat, cut splice dice
dip
   into
take a single syllable
from this poem

allow the words
to proliferate, play
run
all over the play

and so
  in the interests of
the preservation
of hard won liberties
let us
   all
stay
    on the same
page
rejoice in this dictate
        
****
FOR  HANNAH ARENDT

what it the compassion
you can squeeze
like a lemon
drag
from a stone?

camp gypsy
coaxing a wealth
of sadness out of an accordion

a couple of devil
Halloween masks
fall by the wayside

not all that skims
is banal
entirely devoid of imagination

lips finding
special pleasure, dodging meaning

the road
once tangential is
now overgrown
unless it is autobahn

we were
      talking compassion

but dismiss this, or
whatever

not enough tears
in out history
   ever to drench you to death

****
TESLA

the light
transmigrates

was here
now there

st that speed
knows neither
time
    nor distance

even
that wizard Nikola
                       Tesla
cannot
catch it, stop
it telexing itself

from point
to point

suffusing the darkness,
                          waving goodbye
at the moment
of arrival

keeping
you guessing
beyond the possibility
of infinite circuitry

****

IN PARENTHESIS

long division
square root
(stick night
black night
in parenthesis

before you take the liberty
to photon bombard it)

I would write
you up
if you were
worth the trouble
let you
take me in
your arms
and multiply me

all your chromosomes
gotten into the habit
or reading
me like a book

backwards forwards
straight line, arabesque,
turning
     your story my story
into a flip thru
pop up
  illustrated manuscript

shaving away those
bad dreams, wonky genes,
picking and choosing
choice bits
     from my D

N

   A spiral

not all behind
the scenes
        the clothes
the blinds  the curtains

so
   seemingly old  inert,
entropic, horribly
outworn
    and outmoded

see how fresh how suddenly
green
   when you edit, splice
cut through
sheath
    down to essential fibre

highest factor lowest
common denominator

blend with which
life can perhaps do something

****

BOX

packed
my universe

into a box
not Pandora’s
not Schrodinger’s
and nothing

Chinese
a
b
o
u
t
  it

set it
on its way
cast it
adrift

packed it
a box lunch

the universe never
giving
   a free lunch

but here
we are talking
        about the space
outside it

****

ONCE AGAIN

who knows
what lived there
in that stinky,
dirty brown pond

iced over
beautiful again

or so
it seemed to me
back then

here trying
to put into words
my childhood memory

****

SCRUB

scrub what I
said

previously, delighting
in your company

I am not prone to
insincerity, bound
to lie
about my infidelity

theoretical or
otherwise (perhaps
the thread
running
counter-clockwise)

nor will I
allow myself to be
railed (meaning
mono-rsiled)
unwittingly into it
led by
the nose to find
Nature’s soft truth
bound by
those laid-down trails
marked out
as alluring reams of
ribboned finery
that all the world
might see and believe

no let me
unusually direct
sparing in
extravagant epithet
or punctuational necessity,
far from being
abstract voyeur or
philosophical contemplation

stuck at my window desk
sifting through papers
so much
     snow, white
space
inside and out
already falling, falling
beginning to fall

already
       up to my neck in it
obviously lost count of it

not a
bird (in the hand or
bush)

nest
to cuckoo in
within a proverbial mile

****

THE RHYTHM

it is the
rhythm
that survives

finds its home
sets the edge
gives the tone

survives the centuries
connects the stars

lives
and dies
lives and dies

it is the rhythm
that outlasts
decides
what
stays; belongs

survives
the rhyme

****
FIN

we are
at the end of the last reel

the sea is out there
other mise-en-scene

steadicam shot tracking
us as we
go our separate ways
last piece of
dialogue

syllables exchanged
words spoken to each other

the  crew are removing things
the theme is ending
catharsis death

back at the studio
a nightwatchman
flicks the on off switch

****
ASS

listen
observe

I sense here
a mad dialectic

right wing
            left
wing

left brain right wing

not excluding
all that stuff
still left

       in the centre
       left and right of centre

talking opposing fighting
negotiating
       
                      brought to
the boil
coming to head

pain
     in the ass

virus finding the door
wide wide open

no need to burrow
drill
   right through the skull

****

SCRY

I scry
the world

through
smokey quartz

whereby
                whatever
visions I see

always
          remain guarded

steeped
            in cold blood
close to the bone

I scry the stars
through the same
dark crystal

knowing as with us
and our blue
bright planet

out in that darkness
nothing remains what it first seems
  
****

PUNCTURED

on its way
to a smooth landing
3I/ATLAS must
have decisively
punctured
Fermi’s paradox

unless it didn’t
unless
     it was just a comet
after all

a speed freak comet,
utterly anomalous
without
    respect for comet rules
and the abiding
principles
of our scientific community

and all that talk of
lights nicely
    planned trajectory
(worryingly
       strategic) and
messages sent to
NASA telling
us no
    worries within
the hydrogen band

just the usual junk
that orbits
        common sense in
our media eccentrically

product of our
demand for excitement,
need for
       hysteria
fear of annihilation

longing
     for signs and
last ditch
hope that the cosmos
might notice us

assign us place
and propriety we

just do not deserve

****

3I

piece of
space rock
            encroaching

if that be the correct verb
for thing absolutely
shunting it

fastest of the insanely fast
top of its class

which
       speed and
basically everything else

our state of the art
Maths and Physics
can
   say nothing about

every thesis and
theorem instantly
black holed

pure nickel
pure nickel
     not even conceivable unless
metallurgy manufactured

Nature
caught us napping
never told us
          how much out
there is
   left field

        things like that
keen to just fly by
take
  a good luck at us
(though
    without brain, without
eyes

probabilistic freak out
presumably most certainly

****

REAPER

thought roses
inappropriate

so sent you
a bouquet
of Carolina Reapers

could not be
more scarlet

brutally
scarlet

emblem of
the fire
of my love

****

TOUCHSTONE

trick of the light!
the poem
was there
all along

just had
to be uncovered
unless excavated

dug up
out of that trench
fished from
that pond

traced back to
its pathway through
your
   ocean of smart
quick-fire synapses (not
to mix
metaphors at this crucial point)

for here we
outdo ourselves (or would if
we knew
    our power, how easily
we could)
sail that sea of combinations
cross continents of
possibility at
what in reality must
be light speed

test
the horizon of galaxy as
we find ourselves
infinity bound

backwards forwards pitch, yaw
and roll
      from here we can
head in
any direction

rounding the cape
from interior to exterior

and me
      so softly, soundly touched,

rounding you (or
so I must believe)

here at
the heart of simulation
sublime deception

exactly as I dream

****

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

the cabin I once graced
now lies
at the bottom of the sea

seems it was something
of a cursed vessel

and where I am now
this semi-desert
an inland ocean once
paleontology
has determined

in the long long view
that tingle tremble
beneath your feet
may
   at the end of the day
be a matter truly
tectonic

I almost drowned
on a ship
in sea water
         the day before
it docked in harbour

thought I could swim
just sail majestically
across the water

me being
most water
     of all the water signs

sank
  like a stone, a thing
of lead

thought wrong

somehow feel that this is
not the last
episode in
an ongoing saga

me,
and the bottom of the sea

****

OTHERWISE

this flower
might well have been otherwise?

how on Earth can you not tell?

watching from the wings
I will always be there
as my snake self

coiling, uncoiling, sliding
over under
       slurring those many
hissed syllables

in order to educate Eve
as to
    words, possible worlds,
way
   beyond her current
Scrabble set

and in one of these
an Adam without sin
who remains
eternally alone

looking everywhere for
a trace of that beauty
he has
    yet not an inkling of

feeling, despite himself,
an inexplicable sense of
emptiness, incompleteness,
loneliness, loss

whereas
      in all other permutations

he faces a time that
will come when all gardens
must be levelled

where
  the leaves, the trees, the clouds,
the crystal streams and
mirroring waters,
the beasts and birds or the air
whose names
Adam gave

will all forget, be forgotten,
no one will remember, no
one to remember

****

PLAGUE

after years of boarding
and other water torture

he wrote his poems
to continue
the struggle

ease
his pain

avoiding
the word “raindrop”
like the plague

****

CHAIN

For you, Sir,
who have
seen been everything
and so much besides

I am here to announce
my bright design:

a
Seraph

in a clam

can
   evolve to
the summit
Sirrah,
can do what it can

cutting out
the middle man

whose passes
everything up
down
down
          up

in the chain
of command

****

STEAM

let’s make
fire together

in
our little boat
bottom of our boat

when
the sea rushes
in

we may drown
well drown

unless the fire
the water
go
   for each other

turn us
into steam

****

COMPOSITION

pass me your pen
and I shall note down
those distances

the chalk on the blackboard
having list its imperative

the writing
on the wall changing
the moment it
gets written

the truth of relativity
not yet board-dustered off
yet already
done and dusted

and how many tiny white
flecks
   look like motion-
captured stars, galaxies
in their movement?

at if
squeezing
the truth out of us,
pinching our analogies

the Universe were
writing us
writing the Universe itself

putting us
into, pulling us
out oh the picture

trying to figure out
which composition
works best

which
makes the
most sense

****

CHATTER

the forest chatters
so much
to talk about

stuff
    every tree and
squirrel
needs to know

and you
keen to listen in

lacking the equipment
to tune into
those airwaves

wondering how
much you
have
   missed

how key
these messages
going over
your head
(in a
manner of speaking)

****
AUTOPILOT

“Vada a bordo, cazzo!”

I was admiring a metaphor but then it sank
not in wine-dark ocean, somewhere between Charybdis and Scylla
but in turquoise sea, shallow, placid
verging on perfect island.

Earlier
the Captain himself had
put us on autopilot, too suave a narcissus
not to entirely confuse skirting sexual danger with
courting maritime disaster

and complete disaster was it too, for all the beauty of vista and shallowness of water, though not without its
comedy of cruise-control leading to full
Groucho Marx-moment of
tumble into lifeboat (what could be
more providential? did he not think, was
He not reminded of
Freud’s philosophy of the ship and
all of those jokes about being in
a boat and not finding the boatman?)

What serendipity
should we ignore, dare
we escape without
risking the Olympus (albeit these days that
Poseidon, at least has grown so tiny)?

Always the softness of the parallels
that rise to haunt us
even though
we did not see
doomed forever to fail to see them

no matter how careful
we navigate
carefully, frantically, at

full panic station scan the horizon.

****

NIMBUS

exactly what devil
in the detail?

specificity is what
seemed to be
called for here

their bodies
too much addicted
to love generalization
found themselves
             mirrored
in each other
yet never
entirely dovetailed
like bold octave and
sublime sestet
in terribly dulce
juiciest
           sonnet

crooning here
seems premature
      so why
Oh why
throw myself into it?

here that will art/life disjunction with all its unforseen
consequences
will inevitably arise
bringing
       much I would prefer
not having
to contend with

someone out there
always bee in bonnet desperate
to remind one
of how
    slippy sloppy life might
well become
slipping blind
baby mice under
your front and back doors

and who can say and
is saying
         now in fact
exactly

up in the high circle
Mozart Opera-ing

how when you
fall
   from up there
observing Newton’s law

some kindly
sub-atomic might not
switch universes making
decisive intervention

there
      from
lap of the gods
to lap of the orchestra

kindly deliver
          you by parachute
recall

****
BEE DANCER

I am a bee (be
a bee)
alphabetically
entomologically

finding my
sharp little way

flower
       to flower
heading home
stacked
   with pollen

return
      heavy with tales
exquisitely choreographed
of
  how
to navigate

paint them a path
sweet
    as perfume
honeyed with heart

each tiny
          lemniscate
danced with
delight
      danced till I drop

love
   each figure of eight
(even  better
times
     eleven, what could
be more
funky
    than eighty-eight?)!

****

AS IT DID UNFOLD

unfolded the Universe
as if it were

an origami

but on that paper
                           much

to my
        surprise,
                        disappointed,

nothing to find
                              nothing
written

except the thought dawning that
all this time the

                            Universe

         reading me

****

TETRA

they swarm like neon tetra
towards the light
     or perhaps

away from it
out at six back
at seven

this is the lifestyle
that the planet
prayed for

behind
these walls, these gates
every
    modern convenience
means of escape

but me
       having drowned
once already

prefer the death deep
of dark indigo

down
    where survival is
impossible
amongst the incredible
legions of
myth-denizens

and creatures
of infinite aptitude
biding their time

they swarm like
neon tetra, first cousins
to piranha

towards what
they believe just
has to be the light

****

ORIGAMI

haiku is a tiny
paper schooner

plodding down
a tiny stream

imagining everything
in the cosmos
to be
origami

a giant tsunami high
as a mountain

its ultimate cosmic
oceanic dream

****

   REFUND

since the poetry tax

every haiku
is short a syllable

those
       who never
wrote a line

queuing an eternity
waiting for
their refund

and for
those who
never learn

every epic masterpiece
of rebellion
and defiance

plunging into debt
breaking the bank

****

AH! BUTTERFLY

ah! little butterfly
fresh from your epic
of compression
and now expansion

gloriously, ridiculously transformed,
poster child for all
that less
extravagant a species
would have
never seen coming

though I do believe
wings are things
with which
I might have
been blessed before
I learnt to crawl

****

PLAY’S THE THING

the play’s the thing
unless
     forgetting throne, crown,
father poisoned in
an orchard

I decide
to step back, tell
my tale of woe, hereafter
sleep

the peaceful sleep of one
not wracked with guilt

unforeseen consequence
collateral damage

take two succulent heroes
(a loving pair)
get them lost in
incestuous forest

without grid reference, compass,
guide

and so
plenty fairy tale time
to languish
in the bracken
strangle conscience

beg
to be thrown into the brambles
when smeared with tar

in this
our era, ’tis plain
how easy it be
to get smeared with tar
(a whole
industry created
to make it stick)

or
  as if lifted up the tree
canopy high above,
in hydrogen zeppelin
or on
cushions of helium

think
ladder, cloud, spiral
staircase, deus-
ex-machina
elevator

escalator there
only to
convert into metaphor

lost babes
no more
but Castor and
Polluxed
fully
      soaring, rising

high as poetry
complete
as blue
moon
lucid
as song

tale we might
recite together
the metre faultless, not
a rhyme wrong

OCTOBER POEM

I wander the streets
shortly after dusk this
last day
of October

they think
I am an artist
    even though it is
a huge can not
of paint
     but of darkness
I am
carrying this evening
fine and broad strokes
my world
    my canvass yet
as it disappears doing
nothing to
dispel
   any spurious faith
in such enterprise, much
to the contrary
exploiting
their misconceptions
fostering every illusion

blindsiding colour, extinguishing
the light

       so much still to do
a whole tryptich of
forever never

reminding all
and sundry

there
is no final, no complete,
in art, with the imagination

are
     just different species

of the fiction
      that years for
ending

but
    eschews its
own energies of closure

life and death
got the mosaic
                      here

every fragment
priceless

until
    here at the hub
of antimony

I erase that
     palimpsest of palimpsest
might be
paimted,
    written over

   ****

NOVEMBER WEDDING

November wedding
sign of the scorpion

whole road
turned into a car park
for everybody’s convenience

and there be tents and tents
enough
     for a small army

big brass even thumping
bass drum and love
tunes
    pumping out

pulsatimg up to
somwhere
    in the stratosphere to
connect with origins
of the Universe
    pulsar

time for connection, bonds
ties reinforced
our
  mortal duty to
replicate

and I am assuming
he is man of godly charm
and she
   is a beauty

Oh what a lovely loving species
save for one
       pen in hand who
could
not be more funereal

attendance
out of consideration because
take
   one look and
you can see he lacks
                       the rhythm
shoddy on
    the ground with this
surprisingly deep know how

meanwhile so much
in other
    dream time, wife that
was and
all (but no legion)
on the list of the not to
be forgotten
lost
   possibilities and
ghost lovers

let us leave him grieving
for himself
        and yet
               alive here to
the possibilities
further unfolding
    of the human mystery, village
within a village,
story
   within a story

man with
     woman, far
as it goes
never
   losing anything
    crazy as
it gets

bridge to cross and
keep
  forever crossing

however staged
this
     show, this backyard
supreme spectacle

every clockwork Cupid
there for hire
        musical choices quite,
quite marvellous

bound to get
       the whole human hearr
hydrailuc pumping
like a machine

the stars fixed forever at
this moment propitiously
                         or less so

and me
creature without rhythm
stark and alone
and far beneath them

rewinding to other days
and
   life-
   chaning choices

one self off one way
new self
    another

November wedding
marriage according to Mars
red
    raw red rulimg
planet

blending all that is male
all that is female

all that
is the cosmos
to all that is of the soil

****

WITH THE GREEN COVER

I was reading your
second novel

the thin most writerly patriarchal trauma one
with the green cover

wrote a iffy little academic article about it that I let
myself be fooled
was
   so on the nose
close to the bone

and me
your student, forever
your student, never
going to escape
out of
the heart of
that shadow

and now
        that I am older even
than the oldest character
in that tortured idyll

I begin to wonder about all
the ghosts and their voices
and
all the spirit rivers
shapesbifting entities of
standing
   in this land

Oh we have our angels and demons and
rich tapestries of mythology,
you yourself
so valiant
    in the resonant
production thereof

to the extent that if
I am ever going to
escape
    myself
escape anything, everything

am going to have to
return to those pages again
yet again

unmiss
what I most certainly
did miss
    hope it hits  me his time
truly and viscerally

touches
the spot

****
MY GREEN STAPLER

the science fiction
writer

loves his green stapler
more, much
more

than his
android companions

allows him
to concatenate worlds
create hybrids
fuse identities

make a nonsense
of the infinite
curvature of
space-
              time

all he needs to
realize his vision
are portals
       portals leading

everywhere

and, thanks to
the demand created by
my smash-
cut, smashup green
stapler

he is always in the market
for an unbelievable supply

****

GREEN

the rains

       the rain
       the rain
        the rain

have given
the grass, the trees,
the plants

a lush edge

the green fingers of
the gods responsible
for green

        have grown
greenier

and me
                      on the margins

liminal
as usual

       feeling both oddly alien
and strangely at home

****

JUICE

It must have changelinged me
all that juice
goodfellow Puck did spray
around so
most liberally
throughout the play

that I fell qute captured,
sucked into the forest action,
Titania above me
and I, beautifully ass-
headed so
bottomed beneath

and speaking those words
as if we again, constantly,
forever thus
embowered

that magic so vigorous
as I crashed through
every barrier

softly dissolved
this last, ultimate wall.

****
SPRING POEM

for others it be Spring
but this
is our Winter

where is the light here
not without recollection

let me sign
it through for you

the hope that you fimd love
togetherness and completeness

the last
sweet cherry

in the bowl

    ****

DO SHEEP?

do sheep dream
of electric androids?

last night I dreamt
of the temple
of the high abbatoir

scouting out which
I circumvented the butchery
in the dark, dense forest

perfect place (as
opposed to a desert) for
such slaughter
to be hidden

place
    where two and two
make five

or will do if
they tell you it does

TIMELINE

Christopher
in this timeline

never makes it
to the New World
his ships got stopped
in their tracks
by metal flying machines
with stars on the wings
and the power
to sink his
every ship
in half a second

huge metal boats
surfaced from under
the water
    which appeared to
have a few aboard who
could speak Spanish
or Italian

who told him
in no uncertain terms
to return whence he came
M
there, upon his arrival in Cadiz,
no one would believe
his story

and even under torture
the Inquisition in Madrid
could not extract
a plausible account

and, thus, in these
grave circumstances
determined he must be silenced

the thought of such
an advanced civilization
across the Atlantic
would shake
the Church to its core
and threaten the sovereignty
of every European nation

deconstructing
every
     rational premise

from final straw
to germ of an idea.

****
  
MILLION WATT AMP

I espied Apollo there
with his lyre

or maybe an
old banjo from dust bowl
heartlands

I am no
expert on music though
strolling through the stadium
with his
half-brother Dionysos

both exchanging at that moment
a sort of knowing smile

my guy
wondering what it might sound
like and,
more importantly, what
that sounds might do
to the
structures of
society

if it were seriously electrified
Marshall amped up to the max
(not ten
       but eleven)

fuzz-boxed, wah-wah pedal led
and shaking the foundations
of Heaven
through
       something close
to a million Watts.

****

ODA ANACONDA

syllable by
masticated syllable

came across you
filling that legendary belly
devouring every
morsel
of my name

seems
my being a snake too
according to
the ancient astrology

made me
as regards foodstuff
near
    exact fit for you

a task for you
to slide into wisely
without apprehension

if you were
      to call it
a marriage here not
of convenience

but
made it Heaven

consummated
in Hell, in devilish fashion

I would have
to agree

although
equally I might just add

it sounds
just
   as good

the other way round.

****

DANTE

and there
at the very centre
of Hell

we find
Dante

tortured for eternity
for libelling those
above his
station

the justice perfect
the irony beautiful

everything in accord
for one whose wicked faith
could not
comprehend

that the Universe
has its golden favourites
who
   should always
be worshipped, venerated
by those for whom
they are
their betters

the writers
of the law
always
above and beyond the law

(on this angel and devil
could
    not be more
united

it is
their common faith)

   ****

   WOBBLE

apologies
for the speed
wobble

but have got
fully pedal to the metal
watch them
all vanish
in the rear
view mirror

Plato, Aristotle
Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche
all those great philosophies,
species dreams

fascism, dystopia,
cyborg reality,  looming up
ahead
    trying to
millionaire there
quantum disentangle, hit
light speed if possible

all a blur
crazy psychedelic sensation

soon
you will
feel the doom

really get
to the core

be one
with the rule
of iron
over chaos

ride the great wave
final seismic shift         

****

HEY STANLEY

hey Stanley
throw me

                      a bone

                      match-cut
me
to something out there
beyond infinity

Space Odyssey me
strapped to the monolith

so at last I
        can expire

leave the cinema last
rewatch, last time

knowing
    in my soul I
have somehow

          arrived homm