Category Archives: 1, poem, poetry,

BREATHLESS WITHOUT BREATH

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

TROUBADOUR TOWN

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

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

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

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