Category Archives: 1, poem, poetry,

CONCRETE

CONCRETE

poem in the mirror
poem
underwater

poem hitting
the ground running

poem
smashed into
                 concrete

p  i  e
c
   es
                       a ll
ove
      r
                                     the
p
  lace

CAMILLE

CAMILLE

saw you hanging out
at the Mad Hatter’s party
with Madame Ferocity

your girl
I believe, after you
gave us the lowdown,
told us her true story

or was it
more like home turf for you
the two of you
wearing matching aprons
sinking strong, dark
Italian roast
espresso after espresso?

there in some Sicilian cafe
bristling with costa nostra, being
their regular haunt?

Then,
her back being turned,
you tried to (brigand
that you are) sell me the line
that this Amherst spinster
be some
daughter of
Dionysus

making so persuasive a case
in usual heavy artillery style

that was easily seduced
(how could I not be?)
dragged along
pointedly and
pitilessly
for the ride

ON THE OTHER HAND

ON THE OTHER HAND

daylight here
giving me permission to
write whatever I come up with

conscious that the Austrian
did legislate
of what we
cannot speak we
must needs be silent

this itself
being a species of silence

whitespace, words,
you yourself fill
the sound
syllables in
feel how they match
the rhythm

darkness however
(and here so hard to
decide between them)
rejects
silence
in favour of secrecy, mystery
all that
be whisper, middle-of-the-night
to and fro, touch and feel

arabesque
circling the absolute
homing in on fat zero

and,
done with that divine calculus,
invites the light in again
with all
due protocol and
consideration

the love stand-off (some say,
cold war) between them

feels
in my bones
to be too much either-or

sometimes a bit too
sublime, intense, fraught
with havoc
for the sense
of settled taste you
appreciate here

POSTSCRIPT

POSTSCRIPT

blue books
black books

Necromicon
Tractatus

red books
green books too

in the forest, in
the galleria, let
them blossom
let a thousand, million,
billion
books bloom

grow thick as tree trunks
wide as rain forest
be there
for solace or
subversion
lying at the bottom
of every top drawer

or
to prevent escape
save them
from themselves
innocent, experienced
chain them to the pulpit
bolt them to a lectern

cannot have these mechanical
birds of Caxton
soaring flighted, heading off
their own way

spilling our secrets
to red in tooth and claw
alien minds
and their technologies

friends (cousins) far
too green for our liking
brimming with
levels
of Aries energy beyond
rational compare

reading
us the riot act, dictating
terms and conditions of our
post-
human future
final touch put to that
postscript which
you

first read here

SNAKE

SNAKE

Snake
knew he
had been duped

for what was, is,
Lucifer but
the template and
prototype
for your
common as muck
standard garden variety
cheating, lying politician

now, as then,
we desperately love
and cannot get enough of

so he
    turned as he was
leaving, before
finally squiggling away

addressed
  the fallen pair

even as their
joy was
set to
morph
     into devastation

telling them
        hope would remain
as long
    as they swore
upon their now very
mortal lives to

never
    get the poetry

wrong

which
    if we had the capacity
to understand, were
                  on same deep
intellectual
level

might have
softened the nightmare
forever

     right there
and then.

BREATHER

BREATHER

cold day
on the farm

putting my life
together like
pieces of warped Lego
spent too much
time togethe, one
whole summer,
out in the Sun

but my place here
bound to be more
than a makeshift refuge

you
   should come here
join me

home away from home
no nonsense shelter
for all our
darker, unacknowledged,
most intimate of selves

until
    all that is left will
be said in memoriam

expressed somewhat
chivalrously or follow
its gut and
instinct for
the truth

upon the air
a stiff breeze seems to
demand of us
a corresponding, dare we
say, de rigeur rigour

they will
     have no idea what
we might
have told them, how
this
    might have affected, indeed
may well have changed them

if we are
no longer around when
their roads pass through here

CAME

CAME

in the middle of the night
the machines came
filled my brain
with tech,
erased my name

in the middle
of the night
unless

in the morning
sometime during the day

uploaded so much
poetry, philosophy, installed
digital Eliot, Plath, Swift,
Pynchon, Joyce,
Nietzsche, Rimbaud
Bob
Dylan too

and set
me to work

writing, reciting, producing
infinite text in
infinite cycle

twenty four seven
until
    the cosmos

fell apart

in the middle if the night
all here in my brain

SYLVIA

SYLVIA

I am in the throes of being tested
examined on a poem
we have not
seen before

unless I have
unless that
was your poem
smacked me in the face
when last night skimming through
that paperback anthology

if so, must admit
a bit unfair it being
an unfair
advantage

but still
they (those in
the know steeped in
verse, figures
of speech and,
perhaps, poetic history
and literary theory)

they
whoever they are, big
wigs in the Department,
have to determine whether
I am up to
your poem
       not quite yet whether
I am human
or machine

literary scholar or
just along
for the ride
    following you observantly
for I know this
thorned fruit
have
   been bloodied as a child
seeking out the juiciest

will
    know what to do
when you take
my hand
wrench me with
your words out of
the comfort of my world
(this comfort being
unearned, here on
this lofty
campus
staring down upon
the Flats and
the Southern Suburbs of
apartheid Cape Town)

you
my polestar here, point
me any
direction and I will
feel obliged to follow

and nothing
fixed
   even for a moment
everything far
from exactly what it seems

green to
brown to
green
something raging, unbalanced,
in the seasons

something wrong
with time itself (warping in
the heat of
   these scorpion energies
can see
    in the gravity of sheer purpose
you are a late October
child

and me
thinking, talking Transatlantic,
as the berries in your
bottle feel
suddenly thrust upon me

overpowering me
in an instant, which
that whole
new critical cabal
you were
bound to
find at Cambridge

Richards, Leavis (F &Q),
Empson
     and the whole
etcetera

who
   knew instantly what
this
  style meant

but me back there
battling with the simple stuff,
basic
   putting pen to paper

hoping
   what thoughts I think
serious
magic in the
ink
beginning to flow will
just have to express

(but
damn thosr hooks clawing
at you
   same time
holding you back)

something way off-beam
getting forged
in this cauldron

as soon
     as I read the opening
lines, made
the connection
the poem
opened its maw
and duly
swallowed me

taking decades
from that moment
of seizure
to
   digest me

you who
were so badly loved
and much accounted for

and I must tell you
I heard those laureate lips
speak
    deliver the hard
cryptic truth, so-
called gold
veined throughout (I am
told) all
those crow poems,

in a cold Gothic hall
when I was
      a student back in
Manchester

place packed out with
troops of British devotees

and me
    mum about my heresy
that he
    just not
in your league

and now
    by virtue of this
technology of technologies
will be
    the death of us

I get to
chat to
   you, if
anything there is you
resurrected
             for the occasion
courtesy of
the binary brilliance
of an impersonator

and
   I recall
this first encounter

wondering how this clone
will react, what
this mind will say

seems
   I was none too wayward
making personal sense
of that
dark expressionism,
those tortured ramblings

feeling
   that you and
I

always
     to, somehow, share
this reading
all
   our readings

bound in space and time
ever to
    return though

swept away