EXCHANGE
paradox of choice
constant of change
let’s just surrender to
life, the flow, the poem
forget writers and
readers
who is where
who is what
where to find our story
the narrative that spreaks us
captures us totally
in its
open-
ended box
NARC
beautiful planet
so we
can expect narcissism
everybody
overdosing on blue
smoking thick cloud
but now
like a battered football
a bit sore
about its looks
sad for the planet
sure it is has its own
ideal of
something to which
it once
so
tragically aspired
PYGMALION
the gods pitied Pygmalion
his love for his statue
(so nubile under
his fingers),
her reflected love for him
decided to bring them.together,
enshrine in marble
make
their love immortal,
permanent
aching to embrace forever
inching closer each
millennium
a tale with enough true
sadness for
our age
though the fable
Iives
inspires in
different form
secure in
its impossible irony
EXCHANGE
EXCHANGE
I have no
exchange value
you would not get
a sous for me
on the open market
not worth the speculation
and so I hold my breath
will hold it so until
it all
just
burst
till I just
burst
my extinction
good for rarity
TOROJAN WOMBMEN
Toorojan Wombmen
have helmet heads
love licorice
(it is their
most guilty pleasure)
hate
allsorts
would send all allsorts
down to Poseidon’s locker
something fishy already
felt about the smell
Oh but the Achaeans
are coming
the Myrmidions are coming
loaded with logic
and rationality
their armour as
bad-bullet proof
as Blackpool rock
(so many cavities
in the fangs
you
are bearing
so much yellow enamel
in need of bleach)
HARPIES
They tug at the heat strings with state of the art wirecutters
so let us call them
“Harpies”
double envelopment
they have
broken through
both flanks
and encircled humanity
the minds they have captured
headed fod relentless torture
but this
blue bunting, red-
hot pokers
is all about mythology, about
Palladian architecture
and ancient meanings
the ocean sighing as it pulls
back from.the Dover shore
before biting further
into ths landscape
no time to
set fire to the ships we
must imagine them burning
must instruct
the plebs to
see them burning
everything so gaslit
it is plain
as day
and there
quoting disparately
in elementary Latin stands
our Caesar
sort of stands our Caesar
Oh when will
such a Caesar ever
come again?
FOR REAL
No one here
is for real
everyone
is a smiling simulacrum
a fiction of shadows
a ghost voice pleading
poverty from.beneath
the stage
trap door
as if that is not
the place they should be
writing antitheses
finding sustenace
in the darkness
Satire on Rishi Sunak’s idea everybody must do Maths at school until 18.
poem plus AI art
ON THE CARDS
my robot
took me
to the South Pole
she dialed in
a formation of doves
to strafe
me
with lore
took my
heart down
into Vesuvius
Volcano
froze me cryogenically
and sent me hurled me
into deep space
he mind ticking over
as we nudged forward at light speed
her limbs fully uncoupled
and then coupled for
infinitely greater attachment
permanent
decoupling never on the cards
poems 2 die for