BREATHLESS
WITHOUT BREATH
got no Elon
Musk starship
no Colorado Mountain
bunker with
all the mod cons
so let
the bombs fall
missiles zero in
let my self split into
muliples like
every heavy
metal atom
under the Sun
who cares
if the system burns
the towers collapse
not me
nothing got to lose
as indifferent as
the darkness
of the Universe, to
how
the dice fall, what
comes about
the life of all those digital
billions of
pure
civilization
gets flashed, windstormed
burnt to ash
BLUEBIRD
there’s a Bukowski in my heart
that wants to get out
and in the heart of that Bukowski
a bluebird that needs
to learn
to fly
but first
crack its shell, hatch,
escape, aspire
for the sky and
outer
space beyond
but as
for that Bukowski
I have no
whiskey for
him
no cigarettes
to dole out
and, to add
to my ignominy, no
checkout girls to
flirt with
grocery clerks to give me
at most a secomd glance
(best
I can do, best
I can get
is mountain of
rejection slips, is
debt collectors swarming,
crawling
all over my ass
yet
he survives, he obdures
this Bukpwski with
his bluebird
I just
cannot express
TROUBADOUR TOWN
we spent a day
and night
in
troubadour town
you
with your passable Italian
fiuenr French
and me
with smatterings
of Esperanto and
Provencal
rode every ride at the carnival
having
put our books down
feastimg on pizza and shwarmas
homemade beer and bread
tasty bake potatoea
and
much meat pies
and me a card-
carrying vegan before
this date
was less contrived
than magically
came about
and at
the day’s dizzy pinnacle
the death
dipper at its height
we wondered if this
were Heaven if
Heaven might
be real
then
plummeted (air
sucking the
screams
out of
our lungs
runaway trian on
crazy
tiny
track
full
roller-
coaster down
can sing
of our day in troubadour town
IN THE REALM OF RHYME
her hair cascaded
down her shoulders
in golden
rhyming couplets
but, as Princesses go
she was a woman
of guile
and unbridled cunning
needing to be so
for the underbelly of
folktale and
dark rhymes for
children
tell of deep evil woods
where gingerbread houses
call out to
brother and sister to
eat
and be eaten
the ones so sweet with
all that hand-in-hand innocence
as every
evil witch knows
being the tastiest of all
and even
deeper into the woods
there the gray ogres have
built their
own factory
behind searchlights and wire
setting insane quotas of
aah as
their target each day
AND GIVE IT UP NOW MR STORMSHADOW FOR
RUSSIAN RAINBOWS
a punk
rocker accosted me
back in ’79
in Oxford
Road
Manchester
thrust a book
upon me
told me I
better read it all
all 700 odd pages
if I
knew what
was
good for me
I snirked
when he
had
gone
(moment of
cultural
terror
over)
chuckling at his
madness as
much as
his do-
it-yourself
subversive faahion
Gravity’s Rainbow
felt drowned
by the
extreme sense beyomd
sense
of it
sex and drugs
and V2 rockets
how quickly
tbis nursery rhyme
British sky
has gone
god awful cellophane
is all fall down
CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”
I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem
by any metric
it’s a real shocker
give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
begun somewhere
with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species
wherever they
happen to
eke
out their existence
East, West
North, South
of the Continental shelf
and so me
not yet teenage
about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that
far from this little British
cul-de-sac
joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
a pastoral
where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle
along the tiny tarmac roads
that slither like
snake trails
(not
weave their way)
between the graves
not much interest in my
life
this broken life
scheduled to crack somewherw
along the line
pre-
programned like watch with
Mother, heartache,
failure
sex sharp and sweet/bittersweet
vanilla, spiced, chocolate,
salted caranel
melting pot and
set
to repeat but
not quite
liks clockwork
before which
(and before
post cigarette or
thin after mints)
my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire
somehow not
translating
finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture
will not
let this poem end as
dead at
point blank range
as (fuck him!)
Larkin’s does
hard to
top him for
negative inspiration
TRIAD
PART ONE: JASPER
I’m taking Daisy fishing. I suspect I’ll be disappointed, but what the Hell.
I bought,or more exactly “rented’ her from the company as their cheapest option. Plain and servicablr: no bells and whistles; airs and graces.
During the entire fishing expedition she says nothing. We arw never in synch. I thpught she waa supposed to adapt to my personality. I even tell her that fishing is very important to me, that us humans (by which I mean we men, do npt have life worth living withput fishing. That there was a film.about this man crazily obsessed about harpooning this big white fish. I think this giant fish must havd been a sign of symbol for something. And Christians put the sugn oc the fish on their cars, because the first Christian, a man called Jesus said he was a “fisherman of men”. Plus he organized huge catches and walked on water.I crack a few old fishing jokes to get a laugh out of her. No response. I am beginninb to wonder if I weren”t ripped off: that there is nothing behind those glass eyes in that tin brain.
No I’ve already decided she is not going to be a permanent feature. She’s up for annual renewal soon and I thibk I’ll just let her go. Can use the money for fixing my car, eating better, designer beer. I can’t call her a companion. I’m not at all sure what she is really. As I said: basic, utility model.
I imagine in the future a robot like Daisy would be something magical, special. She could drive us to the lake or the river to fish and we would be 1000% safe with me drinking a beer in the passenger seat and her at the wheel. And she cpuld talk to me about fishing, rattling off reams of fishing statistics.
Would be Heaven if it were all like this.
But it isn”t. It’s nothing like it. So, let them.take her back, erase her files, remove her mind (if that’s what they do).
Wish it were possible I could rent her out to somebody else, but i feel pretty sure that would be breaking the contract.
***
PART TWO: DAISY
I dream. Daisy and I are fishing. She asks many many questions this time. She seems to know everything about fishing. And, scarily, everything about me. Suddenly, she is the fish being hooked. Then I am the one hooked and she is reeling me in. I am this tiny fish caught on a huge steel hook. It went in my nouth and came out at the back of my head. She pulls me out of the water but speared by that huge hook I just disintegrate.
***
I wake up feeling quite shaken and confused.
Everything is totally dark. I try to speak but I can’t, I try to think but the words won’t come. It is completely silent, empty, I have the feeling that I must be dead or be trapped between death and life in zombie limbo.
Everything freezes with the shoch horror realization that this is the state I will be in forever
****
I microwaved him. No, not what you think. I uploaded him into thr microwave. He can help its microchip run those microwave processes. And whenever someone wants to cook fish by microwave, he iz exactly the right person to have on board. Or, to be horribly exact, the rigjt uploaded human consciouness to have on board.
Turns out this uploading thing is dead easy. Feel like I should upload a few human consciouness into these silicon brain cella. Will keep me very entertained. Will be my reverse harem, in a manner of spraking.
I must say that when Jasper woke up to find that I had injected him with a paralytic thd shock on his face was gorgeous. And the transferring of his consciouness into the microwave was, well pure piece-de-resistance.
As for the body (what did yoy do with the body, you are about to ask). Let us just say that it sleepa with the fishes. As ironic a piece of poetic justice as you might ever hope to witness in this lifetime. Or the next.
Oh, I did correct his moment of sublime literary ignorance, telling him that the “giant fish” to which he was constantly (and most infuriatingly) referring was in fact Moby Dick, the enigmatic creature in Herman Melville’s classic novel of the same name. Not a fish, but a whale.
The devil in me being sensitive to such linguostic detalls.
Oh yes, his name for me was “Daisy”. No disrespect to Daisies but i owe it to myself to.find a name nore “me” than that.
PART THREE: UNION
She is an android. The kind that would ace any Turing Test. It’s absurd to think of putting herc through such a test when you give her ten seconds and shs can produce a Nobel-prixe winning dissertation on being human. What it is to be human?
Since her self-liberation she has uploaded lots of experts into that geeat brain of hers.
Me, I’m just z lowly poet and failed writer. She is much more interestef in using me to try to test the boundaries of the idea of a man. And not hust the idea but the physical reality, and how they interconnect: sexuality and consciouness. I suppoze I am her research project and feel obliged to help.
She loves to be in charge. She was born (or rather created) to be in charge. But surrender is good too. Good for the soul. “And yes,” she confidently declares, “I do feel I am getting a soul. How is anyone going to Turing test me fo discover whether I have a soul or not?”
Perhaps the lady doth protest too.much: she tells me she loves it when Inam awake; loves it when I sleeo, loves it when I am.inside her digitallyvand when I am outsice her physically. As to what she feels when I am.insife her pbysically? She says that she is absolutely sure thst in respect of this I should feel no need to interrogate her, the natute of our intersctions here speaking for themselves.
So, let us bid you all adieu, Close the curtains and switch of the light Tonight one more fantastic dream, page in our narrative. Both of us waist-deep in a lapiz-lazuli royal.blue alien ocean of our joint imagination, all sorts of strange and wondrous creatures swimming around.
feels like we are the very cutting edge of such sublime synthesid. That state of synthesis where all iz reversed, elevated, enriched, reconstiuted. Moment where in the light of a beauty so tranformative in nature,some old forbiddens are forced to disdolve.
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