Category Archives: poem, poetry

DREAD

your brain
is the
Event Horizon

your brain
is
Mulholland Drive

is
the Overlook Hotel

I sit outside
the House of Leaves
waiting
for the door
to open

for something upstairs
to shuffle out
of stupor

switch on a light
show that
there is
at least a flicker

prove that
it is a Cartesian proof
of conscious existence

the thought that I own
this intensity of dread

ZEITGEIST

steam
going nuclear

hissing through
the pipes

after the roof blew off
mutation and Nature
began to conspire

my brain,
much troubled,
was shuffling through scenes
as if a pack of cards

as if the ghost of a film
Tarkowsky envisaged
but never completed

I looked at my skin
wondered if it could
become and then
saw it suddenly
            do duty as
a screen

I felt like I had become
digital, become metal

without Tesla lightning
without leaves bursting
through my fingers

as some pagan
god or other
felt my mythological truth
was that I should
become a tree

CHANCE

thank you for
sending me all
those weapons-
grade poems

in return I sent you
this end of days
story I am working on
entitled: The Day
the Earth Looked
a Bit Different

something does not
destroy the Earth, or
attack the planet
accidentally or
by intention

merely
     plays around a bit
with our perception

desperate to save our
home world by
heightening our sense
that we
     do not belong here
have little idea
what we are doing
and no real conviction
about who we
really are

undermining our current
compensatory drive for fixity and certainty

it is believed that this
unprovoked alien
interference and
attempted celestial
manipulation

may well be thing
to give us a fighting chance

NO EXAGGERATION

chipped away
at your belief system
with a toothpick

attacked it
with a sledgehammer

to each his own
but do have
to believe
that there are places
where the thick, self-
reinforcing sphere

is eggshell this
and a strategic little tap
for better or worse
can no
exaggeration
bring it caving in

cave being in the context
a pretty astute metaphor

CHUCKY Hello Chucky ever wondered what will be uncovered, or should I say, be thrown up, when the ice melts tapping out these letters in my missive to you I think of myself as akin to an ancient Sumerian scribe some tablets in scrawl similar to my own freed from the icy prison cause of wonder and derision a text so mythological in its truth, connecting each of us to our true alien other about to be uncovered about to find its strangest mirror in the Universe in all this world.

I am done with dissonance
except where
   it captures the complexion
of what surrounds
gives
    taste of the chaos that
riddles through

harmony is the thing that
must nourish, bring together
                        harmony that
feels
      like
             impossible belief

when last, if ever, were
woken by wings
              hovering above
taking angelic form?

just add a few Pratt and Whitneys
and there you have dissonance

what you figured might be
Michael, Uriel, Gabriel
                drowning out the room
with clamour of regular comic
superhero
        (or, indeed villain)
elevated to cosmic, epic,
mythical proportions
        by virtue of three-
act structure, and titanic movie screen

already you can see it touch it
smell it feel it, let alone
                             hear it

this dissonance, every tiny
breath of harmony
         here in me, here
in the poem

so desperate to distance from
                quietly eschew.