1, poem, poetry, – Page 87

ROLL

I let the world
roll

will find a hole,
a Plato cave to go
total Thomas Pynchon

though the pattern
need not be fractal
reek of brutally random
or at the highest
sub-god level
diabolical conspiracy

but you let me
rant and rave because
in the game
it’s zugtwang

cat got your tongue
neither do
nor speak
damned if you don’t

to an eternal pondering
of so rare a hopeless
configuration
of the pieces

clock ticking —
well, yours is at least!
mine sunning itself
with a mixed race Pisces
dragon pop star
somewhere
in Barbados

me Pisces too, and who
says I dare not drean?
who laid down an
edict
that if life be hopeless
cannot sublimate,
replace
with fantasy?

shirk every
tiresome responsibility
shirk realpolitik?

running on fumes, losing
gas, out
of propellant

the fat
part of the world (mum
as to which hemisphere)
has got
even fatter, gone
paranoid schizoid where
was just passive aggressive

see it up
but falling
down from the sky

bad
Icarus moment, raging
at the Sun (just as
it is about
to make an appearance)
sneering at that light, that heat

and here the dice
have rolled as they may

well short of snake eyes.

De Vere
with voices in his head
seeking the silence
of paper
    get the words out
dancing on a stage
before they
send someone to
hang the author
   guillotine them
(a seventeenth Earl
of Oxford) might
just survive

Shakespeare
needing money
to silence
his creditors
but a best bed so
he might bequeath
his current one

spend all day practising
spellings and signatures
scrawling
fervently up
and down the wall

go on alternate media
you can navigate them
slip your ship
between channel that
is Scylla
and channel
that is Charybdis

find island of polished equanimity that
might, in
its absence, serve
as truth
allow bucketfuls of
free download
Information dumps to fill
every gap in every picture
hole
in your argument

and there we are
positions intractable, titanic forces,
seismic struggles bound
to tsunami drown us
or devise
less topical death

big wave collapsing
somehow ricochet from
a bullet
a butterfly fired somewhere

tiny chaos I had in mind
put an O down on the page
(hazarding a circle)
to
at least make a beginning

amazed to see
the white of this ocean
storm, go
so beserk

feeding of which
energy

easy for the poem to
write itself in
delivering the rest