1, poem, poetry, – Page 16

OF ORPHEUS

nothing stopped
slowed down

the clockwork
kept running

Hermes
on time with
all the crucial mail

and lacking all hiatus
the merest suggestion
of a frozen moment

flesh and
spirit
finding themselves divided
wondered how the
world could
yet
be green

time ticking and my lyre
learning of this
to spite
every serpent, in the main
those deadly
in their venom

refused to play, eschewed
all that can
plug in, be electric

and me looking back
not eyes dead ahead on
the road to
consummate
my love

should have them glued
sold my limbs on the dream
of finally
your touch

for real
not in this most
central of myths, key
to our
entire mythology

ultimate heart of
every lost dream

ON MY HEAD

before the trumpets
I diligently plunged
into my physics book

read things to
get grades, stand
me in good stead for life

valency, energy,
mass, atom, isotope, chain

everything said there
absorbed it greedily

now
weight of the years,
all that old stuff
clogging up
my arteries, reaching critical mass

liberated
from those pages, released
into
the atmosphere, heavy
as all those elementS
much heavier
than lead

winging, wending, winding
their way
West to East, North
to South, East
to West

expected in
a few minutes in
full glory

devastating their landing
on my head

arriving way before I
get to
hear
the sound
of a trumpet

EXPRESSO

need to
write stronger
go darker

cultivate a much
more concentrated
single, double
expresso style

with milk, overloaded
with cream, or
black
as Nature intended

gotta brew slow
drink fast to cheat
time in this scheme

FADE

Caligula sleeps
(and for a
moment Rome
sighs
with relief)

wants to be Caesar
wants
a power parade

yet
by the time he
finds himself in the position
to become one,
have one

that god-like mind
will have drifted away

ceased to
function, slipped
far beneath
the level of dangerous
dementia

terminal shade
of fade

THAN WE WERE LED TO BELIEVE

ideas come and go
court words, sometimes
bond with them

come and go
like, as this starched aesthete said,
like women talking
of Michelangelo
lovers of classic form

or they sing
like sirens to follow
them deep
even though they know
whilst poets, artists we
may yet
be
we are nevertheless mere
mortals
may well be lured
by the mystery to
embrace our own drowning

and there, strandloper, desert
shadow
we may well find you
catch you
between the lines
more agreeably human, far less
invisible than hoped for
as you had intended

not the catalyst
we were led to believe

DENIAL

a bug clawed its way
in through my navel

hurt like hell
those titanium pincers

told me instantly
I had misread
my world
got it wrong

sometime in the past
this shift in
genre, everything
turning
science fiction

dystopian, not
the utopian kind, total shock
not nice surprise
in every bit
and byte of
its
dream logic

and you
curious, if not
at the limit of your anxiety,
to
know
the wherefores and whys
of this threshold reality

would be happy to explain,
conscious of the likelihood
of throwing you
into
a denial
from which you might
never escape

INALIENABLE

sorry G
for slashing at you
satirically

losing my cool
yet
still trying to
be brutally funny

no doubt you
being golden DJ
and everything
setting yourself up
to the call
the shots

know it is
my democratic right
to smack you
satirically
whilst defending
your inalienable
democratic
right

to speak freely
no matter what agenda
no matter
how cutely nonsensical

how third reichy
I believe it feels

PAR FOR THE COURSE

I come
and
go

come and go
go
and
come

collapse in
your arms
(one
happy wavefront)

hard to make sure
every fractal
on board
on the same page potentially,
pointing in
the same direction

the mystery I am
you are
delirious product
of choices

what
you are reading right
now for instance

coming and going
going and coming

glimpse of the pattern
even pattern
of patterns

par of the course
(true or false? spin
the coin
you decide all
up to you)

I come
and go

THEREIN

ah, such golden
reflections on the ills
of democracy Mr Cliff

I wonder what heightened
state of political consciouness
making
you kin
to Plato, produced
such
desire for curation, left
us with
so much to mull over
State of beauty in
all its golden
reflection

ruled and voted for
by the very best, like
your good self

hearts of solid, pure
high caste iron

brain
of shiny tin

(all such philosophical
mumblings, rumblings,
perfect expression
of the truth
therein)

TODAY

today, no cheap
linguistic tricks
I promise

such as
comic wordplay involving
crude pun, your
basic
obvious homonym

such as
poor Gareth, so
on the
wrong side
of history,

losing
intellectual footing
tumbling
off a cliff

in his desperate intervention
to save the State
by savaging democracy

anything to distract
from the patently
racial
sleight of hand