Category Archives: 1, poem, poetry,

PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

A poem is a window
of opportunity

and through this window we can see

that the Sun is a dunce
in a starfish ruff
making a meal of
crab-like offspring.

No one can tell
in the absurdity of deportment

whether he is
in opposition or
conjunction entirely.

Yet
on his watch

the dolphins are
doing themselves proud
in the statements of relevance

sewing the seam of an onrushing       wave-
                                           mountain

their far needle-bodies
                        zagging and zigging

making a nonsense of the
sky’s reservations
it is
     my considered poetic belief.
                                      

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE LIKE AN INDIE MOVIE)

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE LIKE AN INDIE MOVIE)

they put a poet
on reality television

gave him
all of sixty seconds to come up
with a, rhyme

I was not invited
into the studio
did not get
to witness the programme

but I think I am up
to imagining how it must end

the poet
dies (of course)
from loneliness, or whatever,
but that
sixty second poem
gets over its grief

the audience overdosing
on sudden one
night stand leading
to celebrity
and Hollywood happily ever after

serious sugary white
powder hit that elevates
so high no one
is, ever going to recover from

underpinning
that great existential truth
bringing it
down from the mountain

that
nowhere in this script
is there provision for
found soulmates
riding
off bareback,
without saddle. into the sunset

life being
mere rehearsal for what
gets shot for the big screen

..
…

BOMBMAKER, THIEF

BOMBMAKER, THIEF

And with
true Gallic verve, the French
bomb-making physicists
scoffed at my idea
that the quantum realm
infiltrates
our reality, gives it
scare quotes, mystifies its imagination, lets us
believe in a
physics of absurd probability
by virtue of the, quantum
field interface
with the human brain itself

how could
it not do?
      makes perfect poetic sense

if we
involved in it
got to
reek of paradox

of
    sudden vision of
an alternate
state of affairs

possibility of a
very different world
free of the thought
of species suicide, sudden
annihilation

those weapons gathered, harvested, taken
and trashed

meanwhile
   back at the ranch, or
in the City of Lights
(whole thing formerly
odds on
doomed to
evaporate in a
single blinding flash)

that whole caboodle, despicable,
cosmically ignorant, arrogant arrangement
drowning as the Seine leaks in
floods the bottom
of Rimbaud’s drunken boat

in that
alternate universe I now
so many years
after the fact
fondly imagine myself
now placing them in

TOLCHOK

TOLCHOK

got clockworked by a plod
me and my droogs we did

next to Maine Road
for playing street football
alongside a football ground
(none of us
even a
City supporter)

and pushed around by
the law severely human right
violated
   and seriously affronted
aforementioned street
being empty
the thought
    did cross our minds of
doing him in
(burying that fat
navy blue body beneath
the Kippax Stand)

and all of us
at Manchester Uni
me for
me Ph D

working on Swift’s excoriating
satire
  most violent stuff
confined
to print

tolchock called down
on mostly everything

got
clockworked
but no orange

that
C-charged
most creative of
colours
Eden-juicy
most sustaining of fruits

TESLA

TESLA

the light
transmigrates

finds us,
for better
or for worse
will always
find us

death written into
the lifetime of
a standard
Edison globe

too much
here there everywhere
to these waves and
particles
for even you
to shepherd
my alluring Nikola

the stuff
winking at us
telexing itself
as it sees fit

and yet
strangely together
fully on point

still so much
about its smarts we
need to scope, astutely
thought experiment

something about its circuitry
we
      both suspect
runs infinite
 
     winds us
          like a} key
  

TUT TODT

TUT TODT

my parents

once young
now elderly

now
dead

demanded on
a daily basis
I be respectful
write nicely

cherish every moment
of what they did to
(sorry, did for) me

keep that overwhelming love
I felt and showed
when I was young
         the love of
one
who could not
have been more wrong
could not
have been more
useless

Oh, those gaslit days,
chip off the old block
determined
to
shape me as

strange how
time takes, took,
eviscerates
all that 1940s
dapper Dachau elegance

like demure store-front mannequins
neat in their flexible
moment of life’s capture

waiting
upon the rapture of bone

force
to split a dove

tut todt
you would be shocked
to know
     how you
are remembered

beyond your pay grade;
beyond your conception

AT THIS RELATIVELY EXACT MOMENT

AT THIS RELATIVELY EXACT MOMENT

sent my cats
into outer space

because I felt
they perceived me to be
too idiosyncratic

felt that they
would be much happier
living on a planet
without humans,
perhaps ruled by dogs

and there they are now
up there about
to leave the solar system
on their way through
the galaxy

tons of recyclable water
and cheapest brand
pet food

about to found a
new civilization some day
at this relatively
exact momemt
    off all our
star charts already

the most sneakily dominant
infuriating predatory species

we have
ever seen
our world has
ever had

LOST ON ME (HEADCASE)

LOST ON ME (HEADCASE)

the gods did it
so wanted to fuck with me

last day
before i left England
to journey
to South
Africa

apartheid
South Africa
some sixty
two
  years ago

threw the book at me
(two of them actually)
hurling them
     from the top of
a wardrobe
(direct hits
  on my cranium in
both cases)

later, in these very books,
I would find
      parallels,
Polyphemus tragically blinded
by Nobody
throwing boulders at that
taunting Achean hero
to avenge
     his mutilation

or Ajax throwing rocks
at the Trojans as battle became
brutal
   beneath the city walls,
the fate of
all Ilium
   hanging in the balance

of course, being only eleven,
this symbolism
was lost
     on me
and Homer’s Iliad and
the other one
had, no effect on me, were
lost on me

about to sail the wine dark sea
myself
      they did not
impact my life at all

amusing them that in their hubris
they thought
     they might reduce me
to a blind poetry headcase