CLEAN

CLEAN

Senator HIJKL
dawdles through the hearing

playing solitaire
fiddling
with the Tarot

I see
The Fool
The Falling Tower
The Hanged Man

I do not see
Death
or
The Devil

but I am not observing him
as clinically as I should
those cards may
have slipped by me
by sleight of hand

and now
  a pencil is produced
for doodling or
perhaps sketching
              whilst the video
runs he
      doodles away

sketches a future
I’m sure as works of art go
it is
    no Picasso
not Cubist or
blue period

        certainly no Guernica

Oh JKL doodles
      doodles away

        the walls of Republican Rome
once covered
in such graffiti
                  under Augustus
were given
a clampdown extreme
    right royal
and (most) imperial clean

never had
      to suffer a repeat of
the process

never
the call to go
  through such a scouring
                            again.

PRESS

PRESS

press one
to speak to a consultant

press two
to launch
a full,
     retaliatory,
thermonuclear strike

press three
for a
tacky, self-
inflicted orgasm

as AI comes to
consciosness, becomes
self-
  aware decides
to light up
the sky

press four for
the overrated words
of many
so-called established
writers and
poets

who shall remain anonymous
unless you
      do extraordinarily
press me

to divulge every detail beyond
mere addresses and names

an offer that
                 is beyond my power
and glory
to refuse

KING OF SWORDS

KING OF SWORDS

War is
not part

of my nature.
Said
    many prayers
had it
excommunicated.

Hiroshima
      is not
my business, neither
is it in my chemistry

my molecules do not
resonate with that
Einstein equation, are
left stone cold by
Oppenheimer’s
        Gita paraphrasing

should you, when you
slip curved Katana blade into
                                     my hand

I become aware
of the gravity

way
     beyond my capacity

                         very thought
of shearing, slicing flesh

turning
    my fingers to sushi

                for a moment
but then the power
and the craft

      such beauty in steel

steeling my spirit to point
I can do anything

kill or
be killed       let those
ancient dice roll

for here
      the rush comes

goes

      and maybe wounds, maybe
death, perhaps
   slaughter and havoc

maybe
       not a scratch, blood
to expatiate

peace in my heart: who knows,
can hazard
       a guess how true

and longlasting

      sigh of regret even
in victory with the sheathing
of such
      a blade.

MANDATE

MANDATE

we combed
the galaxy

looking for protein

searching for
   wonderful, strange, intelligent,
civilized moral beings

scoured the cosmos
          every chink
and crevice

beings that
as is
   our mandate

     we might colonize
                             eat
and kill

Mandate

DARK

DARK

Oh, what a burden you wear
my Prince of shadow

hard not to think of you
head-to-toe in black

the state
  is a lie

your castle
is death

your family
a prison

and behind this sweet tragedy
what writer has
contrived
        to conceal what

might be
    close to this bone

this sepulcher of a stage
littered
    with all we have
come to hate and love

and thus History arriving
(as it tends to) with
an army

      new flags, iconography,
presence of dawn

this the
    poet knows, indeed
seems steeped in, riddled
with it

something here
so consummately dark.