Category Archives: poem

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

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.

MASH UP

MASH UP

it’s all
a mash up

can’t get head or
tail of anything

saw this thing bullet-
spewing, bullet-riddled
claiming to
be rational

so, for God’s sake,
plrase exercise, and if not
exercise,
   express extreme caution

when you pitch up
at my door to exterminate

careful not to throw
me and the baby
out with the boiling bathwater

as you flood through
every room with
mandate
       to control
penchant to wipe out

POLITY

POLITY

let me speak
on behalf of all small
creatures

myself having
been  small creature
who survived extincion event

millions of years ago
having grown to the
power that laughs at
they who could not stay
the great lizards

the thunderous power
ever
    expanding power
to destroy this planet
in a moment
on
    a whim
with a single breath

let me speak for the worm
and the millioede, the gnat
and yes, the butterfly

let me speak
      their polity

   their dream of survival,
of creature prosperity

on their behalf
become foreceful, get rhetorical
make a clear case for them

so much
    we owe them in that

should
    not overlook

          in their smallness
   humilitu

let me speak
      for these creatures, lesr
no one speak for them

FIELD

FIELD

find me in the quantum
vacuum
for if you do not, if
you fail to
then I will find you

will watch as you count your
store of hours, minutes, days
getting spent

blowing kiss after kiss
to blur, to spoil,
cloud that mentality
of linear trajectory

and when the light comes
wave after wave like
warm sea washing over you

know that it is I
who once was something
different entirely

know that it is I
realize it is
me

soft surge of
energies can
cannot be

SPECKLE

SPECKLE

SPECKLE

whole life I have been
looking for refuge
looking
      for consolation

refuge from so many things
better not innumerate
bore you
        waste your time
with a long, long list

but as for consolation,
have sought it everywhere
in art, in poetry,
consolation in fiction
(and yes, Boethius) consolation
                        in philosophy

but above all
                and below

it is you
      I have sought, thirsted and
hungered for, dreamt of
prayed
      night and day that
      if only

sought each little tiny consolation
that you might give

in every (almost invisible)
        significant speckle in
your
      dark, dark skin