Category Archives: poem poetry

MACHINE

MACHINE

“The autonomous logico-fantastic machine is something I like insofar as (and if) it serves some real need: the need to enlarge the sphere of what we can imagine, and to introduce into our limited range of choices “absolute rejection” by means of a world thought out in all its details according to other values and other relationships.” Italo Calvino

you must have
read this poem yesterday

or maybe you are
planning
to read it
tomorrow

stop me before
I ramble on erroneously:
you may well
have read the poem
today
    already

perhaps
    you are ahead of me

just how it is
       how this machine works:
nature of the game

it could be  stone-cold fact

that you
are always ahead of me

maybe you read it
when I was undressed

might have told me
I would have dressed
smartly for you

or gone all Lagerfeld
dressed
       to kill

but what use seduction
when I may
well
    be dead already?

what use
          putting pedal to the metal
linguistically speaking
upping the ante
so that
        my words
                 might touch you well?

you read this poem tomorrow

you read this poem
                     how things at
that moment dictated
                       everything

and
    short of signalling every cue
or clue

     nothing I could do

MORPHOLOGY OF MARTIAN

MORPHOLOGY OF MARTIAN

let us
   invent

an ancient language, lost
for millennia

call it “Martian”
let us
    construct a grammar
divine a morphology

a language that will
refuse to lend itself to
the trite
    and the trivial
bend its form and structure
in the service of evil

like all the languages do
on the planet right now

giving propagandists their
dark joy
  in the fabrication of oppositions
construction
  of hierarchies

building of pyramids and towers
to mask
     diabolical schemes

no let our language
dispense with all gatekeepers

show itself truly generative,
supremely transformational

in its very acts of creation
turning to the galaxy
to glean
     from every language,
every spoken
written tongue

     downtrodden
         and suppressed

FIELD THEORY

FIELD THEORY

a thermonuclear blast
that’s real loadshedding for you

have to
      figure out
lightning, atoms,
electromagnetic field
how they connect
what
    is the exact interplay
between the four forces

all this at
    a University

built
    from twigs
and leaves

so much needing
to be re-
invented

not least
ourselves

WHEN NC GOES MISSING

WHEN NC GOES MISSING

when Noam Chomsky goes
missing in M. I. T. they will
all say
  end of an era
I will say
  end of a planet

and
  we will both
essentially
be correct

though my
feelings on the matter
might be difficult to
express
      might struggle with
all sorts of
gatekeepers
    internal and external

battle to find both
the voice and platform
in which and from which
      to express this

eternal battle: beyond good and evil
(as Uber-Fred put it)
fight to
      the death and
beyond death

between
    the politics of print
and
  creativity of grammar

Oh we all await
our day of reckoning
but how we
    characterize them
so fundamentally
different

no rapture for me please, nor
May Day square tankfest

but to see you
    on the podium confirms
grace
  of intelligence
intelligence of grace

so much silver hair there
and beard

who now has the audacity
to argue the toss
            for supremacy
of golden?

WITHOUT

WITHOUT

poems written in the darkness
have a different timbre
a different cadence

a fundamental uncertainty
word insecurity

for light
            is the state
the statistics do show
heavily favored by readers

and without readers
          (stuck in the dark,
dead in a war that
suddenly escalated a
little
  bit nuclear)

who cares
what is written
on the page at all

at all?

ANCHOR

ANCHOR

I am
at anchor

around me deep currents
connive; slurry unseen

so what
    can better can worse
move you, break you
topple towers

    leave our whole world,
your world, my world,
                    entire planet
hanging
    by a thread?

thread my spool less than silken
still deep into the distance
way out
        towards forever

and all that ever amen you
feel duty bound to add

eyes closed
        fingers steepled

so much further than any horizon
beyond what eyes can see
mind
    believe.

FINAL FRAGRANCE

FINAL FRAGRANCE

Oh the smell
of sex!

sweet sex, smutty sex,
jump out of your skin
whole body
carnal
    knowledge sex

devastating, delicious,
migrating, miscegenating,
person
    next door,
from the depths
    of a jungle planet on
a galaxy
   far far away

widrninv youd experience 
the gene pool
   hybridizing for giggles
to create
   fiture utopian worlds

just to release some
pressure experience
an ulimate high

float beyond space and time
experience the ultimate
together
    have one crystal
clear headspace carbon
life form moment

as if you turned yourself
to diamond in the
            (final
fragrance)
John Lennon imagined  sky