I FEAR

I FEAR

I fear your poem
is all too
well-honed,
pristine, elegant and
refined, allusively rich,
painstakingly polished,
well made,
            second guessed,
overdone

something minor TS Eliot
wrote
       far from the heart

spills out
        as interest  dances
off the tongue

I am
   afraid I should love this
as mark of my measure but
the beast of
an appetite
              argues
not to my taste, outrageously
negative

insists what you have preferred
here within my right to refuse

and so
     like me float with these words
follow like a
steadicam
    this thing without edge
me now
most like balloon

oh how is it
      what is it
I missed that day
I bunked poetics
that has rendered me
such a fool

nothing I might imagine
no one I know
      more alien in aspect
to what
you do present

flouncy, fleecy,
veritable
       breath of the gods

scanning your topography
that pen indeed
touched paper

hard
     to accept

COME

COME

come
come

fly in
scan us cautiously,
catefully

on every
wave band

come
check out
our genocide
take a
ringside seat

you
  took our call
took every precaution
donned a plethora
of disguises

flew faster
than anything ever
encountered
across
   the galaxy

come see
for yourselves

call
  it now

AROUND

AROUND

took a slow, deliberate
dead man’s walk
from home
base down
to the convenience store

found (or should I
say “caught”?)
the philosophers of
rock and
hip hop clowning around

somewhere within
the precincts of a
great subterranean
think tank

hidden to
the nth degree
from the likes
of you and (poetic
licence) me

and so sage Snoop and
Professor Morrison
discussed the poetry of
our life
choices

whilst those deep beneath
drafted and discussed
power
    point presentation
after power point
presentation

debated some faultless
blue print for
the end of
us

necessity of sacrificing
the all
for the small

no future for a
species here
dedicated to
the joy
   of clowning around

SHOT AWAY

SHOT AWAY

working on my poem
tinkering, hammering away

X marks the spot
where the writing
got stuck, became defunct

and Marx and Engels
now branded unconstitutional
my university roon mates
in Manchester from
a whole
different time

meanwhile watching
content creators reacting to
Mick and Merry Clayton
voices in
   unison soaring, screaming

wonder what Rosa Lux
would say about everything

as I walked
with Karl along his river
to its confluence
with the Rhine

thinking up words
and images
        will never find
their way

into the nuts and bolts
and hammered frame

of something
that could ever
say anything to the world

as the song tells it
just a shot
a kiss away

LAST NIGHT

LAST NIGHT

last night
unexpectedly

against the odds
out
   of the blue
against
the grain

we
   became lovers

as a result
   physically. philosophically.
are
   welded together
possibly forever

and in retrospect
lying in bed, in your arms
swear you
    took advantage of me
took me
by surprise

got bliss blitzkrieged
by you
      caught and captured

bombed, stranded
by your beauty

the two
of us suffused
blended
together

one movement
in a symphony, one connection

so complete
movement of movements

both of us
left hanging on for dear life

UNDER SCRUTINY

UNDER SCRUTINY

will it all
bear scrutiny?

I have also
drooled over these
Michelin star hotels
and restaurants

hoping that they will survive
that you will not
summon me to
destroy

such
   a golden circle of elegance

haute couture people
dining haute cuisine

too exquisite one feels
for them to ever to
be put
    to my diabolical test

force them to answer
my ultimate question

subject them to such a
basic law of mass
and speed

turning the heat up
on their politics, empathy,
economic principles

a tad below that
of a million suns

SMORGASBORD

SMORGASBORD

we were
cooking together
hot
   at work
in the kitchen frying,
grilling  blanching, searing,
working to bring
out the transformative
best of every ingredient

making magic
performing alchemy

and then in the afterglow
of taking everything
to super
     high temperatures

harvest of all our efforts
much food there for
us to crazily enjoy

dishing up
a breakfast buffet to
reward out efforts

nothing less in the savoring
than a full smorgasbord