1, poem, poetry, – Page 129

QUIETLY

me and my
postmodern imagination

sat together quietly
thinking about you

comimg up with famous
film scenes the three
of us might appear in

just the three
of us
cutting and pastimg
from classics, mainstream,
and independents
alike

as if we had become
possessed by the genius
of Mr Tarantino

players and played
as it is with
practically everything
most of the time

you, me
and my postmodern imagination,
only thing that
connects us
any way at all

DARKER TURN

when I die
condense all
I was
and now am

into a love poen
single, short, to the point

thing of night and dream
and moment when
all our darkness
all that
we are
of darkness
thrives, comes alive

knows
the bliss
of a star

when I die
turn me into
a love poem

short
and to the point
nothing special
of diamond, golden

thing in the heavens
like Romeo’s heart
speaking plainly

not
(as Juliet did envision)
beautifully scattered

and then
if I am read

(if you
are the one to read)

put
what did, what was

into some
forever parenthesis

just to say, remind me,
that I am
thing of absence,
thing of
the darkness now

this
small, petty life that
writes

being so
preoccupied with what it says
what said

took a
sweeter, darker turn

CAVE

by the time
news of the election
happened to reach me

it had aged, ten
twenty years

and I had
aged a thousand
so sarcastic thanks
due to Albert
opening this can of worms

despite the shock of relativity
the news
      was soggy with conjecture
about coalition
of the centre
   vaunted talk too of
government
of national unity        and
me so far
    out the frame, swinging
pitching
in left field

not boding well
my initial gut reaction, by
the time
I’d sussed the story
seemed
    all talk of rebirth, revision,
repentance and renewal
at every
   little individual, and
of course, the national level,
was perhaps
a tad
    too hopful, insanely premature

but this analysis killed
left me crippled, ancient

as old
as Plato

him stuck way back when
still dreaming of his
Republic of philosophy, hierarchy,
meritocracy

and me
totally
abstractrd
out of the picture

still hanging around,
       for better or forcworse

               somewhere
near the backwall of
his absurdly
over-estimated cave

***

TUBULAR

here’s a tube
of me

and now I have
a tube of you

if someone were
to come
out of the blue

mix what’s in
the tube
of me with

the tube of you

it would be
no mere inadvertent
pleasure

THE BOOK; THE WINE PRESS

ROLL

I let the world
roll

will find a hole,
a Plato cave to go
total Thomas Pynchon

though the pattern
need not be fractal
reek of brutally random
or at the highest
sub-god level
diabolical conspiracy

but you let me
rant and rave because
in the game
it’s zugtwang

cat got your tongue
neither do
nor speak
damned if you don’t

to an eternal pondering
of so rare a hopeless
configuration
of the pieces

clock ticking —
well, yours is at least!
mine sunning itself
with a mixed race Pisces
dragon pop star
somewhere
in Barbados

me Pisces too, and who
says I dare not drean?
who laid down an
edict
that if life be hopeless
cannot sublimate,
replace
with fantasy?

shirk every
tiresome responsibility
shirk realpolitik?

running on fumes, losing
gas, out
of propellant

the fat
part of the world (mum
as to which hemisphere)
has got
even fatter, gone
paranoid schizoid where
was just passive aggressive

see it up
but falling
down from the sky

bad
Icarus moment, raging
at the Sun (just as
it is about
to make an appearance)
sneering at that light, that heat

and here the dice
have rolled as they may

well short of snake eyes.

COMPULSION

Oh that compulsion
know it too well!

De Vere
with voices in his head
seeking the silence
of paper
    get the words out
dancing on a stage
before they
send someone to
hang the author
   guillotine them
(a seventeenth Earl
of Oxford) might
just survive

Shakespeare
needing money
to silence
his creditors
but a best bed so
he might bequeath
his current one

spend all day practising
spellings and signatures
scrawling
fervently up
and down the wall

go on alternate media
you can navigate them
slip your ship
between channel that
is Scylla
and channel
that is Charybdis

find island of polished equanimity that
might, in
its absence, serve
as truth
allow bucketfuls of
free download
Information dumps to fill
every gap in every picture
hole
in your argument

and there we are
positions intractable, titanic forces,
seismic struggles bound
to tsunami drown us
or devise
less topical death

big wave collapsing
somehow ricochet from
a bullet
a butterfly fired somewhere

tiny chaos I had in mind
put an O down on the page
(hazarding a circle)
to
at least make a beginning

amazed to see
the white of this ocean
storm, go
so beserk

feeding of which
energy

easy for the poem to
write itself in
delivering the rest

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