STARBOARD
why am I not
at the river mouth?
where sea, ocean
swallows what the river
has to say
in some old boat
navigating this estuary
removed from every regrettable
trait of this mechanized,
corporate
academic world
nothing to edit, lecture
to prepare
article to co-write
just
time turned irrelevant
as we lie down in the keel
of this celebrated
drunken boat
your drunken boat
that took
the Seine by
surprise, by stealth,
by storm,
as we
quaffed the green absinthe
until we ourselves
became luminous
yellow-green
nothing quite
to meddle with your mind
like that
beverage
and you mumbled your plans
in a spray
of wild poetry:
gun running, Africa,
early
iconic death
lesson that the wild electric
children of tomorrow’s
tomorrow
could ape, imitate
freely swallow
and there now we see it
and steering to starboard
the first of his kind
to fight
to destroy Empire,
renounce this world
and its rules and its laws
and its doctrines and
its claims to
power, mastery and
authority
that sleek terror monster
beast of rivers and
curved sheet steel
and its Captain, oozing nemesis
and the anger
of a subcontinent
there to
take us aboard
we angling to
be taken
aboard
leaving the river mouth
for depths beyond imagining
taken
beneath
own world, our world,
world of our own there beneath
poems 2 die for 