Alice in Wonderland – poems 2 die for

POEM FOR 1983 ME (revised version)

POEM FOR 1983 ME

there you are
in that disintegrating photograph
so sure of yourself
Mr Wry Smile, so unsure of
yourself : deconstruct
this photo Professor Academic
Expert
so much space here
to delineate those inner doubts
and (to make no bones
about it) existential torments
scars of neglect

and what eyes have browsed this?
looked here, remembered,
eyes have looked into,
souls loved, have loved,
still love
could never
possibly forget
(know who you are, know
what history we have,
stuff
shared together)

and now having
pulled this out of the hat
my next trick
will be
one of disappearance
taking all this stuff of self
off the shelf
go Cheshire Cat on you all
(having at times
threatened to
go full
mad hatter

perhaps in truth, far more Alice
caught right there
before the door into Wonderland
crazy. divine, nonsensical
quantum who
knows what
Wonderland

battling to balance
medicine that makes me
too big medicine
renders me too small

she
of the sign of the Libra born
most loved of the beloved
quietly shaking
her head at this point

and you
who only yesterday
told me
to come visit

hit me
with all that goddess mythology
made everything
look so
effortless

what fatal nonsense
was it our paths crossing

what fatal
nonsense was it
nothing and not
everything, all?

POEM FOR 1983 ME

perhaps in truth, far more Alice
caught right there
before the door into Wonderland
crazy. divine, nonsensical
quantum who
knows what
Wonderland

battling to balance
medicine that makes me
too big medicine
renders me too small

she
of the sign of the Libra born
most loved of the beloved
quietly shaking
her head at this point

READING MR STEVENS AS SHADE OF COLOURLESS GREEN

READING MR STEVENS
AS SHADE OF COLOURLESS GREEN

close to the shoals
of colourless green
Mr Stevens verged
close
to wreck, was
my initial fear

this I saw
oe believed
I did espy
with my
own two eyes each

mesmerized
though
the sound did sedate whereupon
yes, seduced me
to a danger
I dare
not stomach
actually embrace

and to
think out there
a, whale of a, whirlpool
Charybdis to outdo
closest thing
terrestrial (I meant maritime)
to that fat
killer singulaity
they say drives the galaxy

and yet be
a secret
submarine portal to
an all new
nonsense Wonderland

where
Hatter 2.0 and
the entire 2.0 gang

speak this post post post
Also Sprach colourless
idea
sleeping, dreaming, totally
insomniac
deconstructive
jibber jabber

giving
the poem such
a hard time of it

ideas colourless green
fried to a frazzle
in the desert

or there miraculously in
the mind of Apollo
whilst

he sleeps
lives his cosmic wet dream

read it here, on the page,
then tell me
it might never come to be

PARTY

mad hatter dude
is throwing a party
crimson locks
under scarlet hat
being
less than mag-
unanimous in
every
discussion
(all of them
shading into
existential struggle)

things
getting bad since
not a shred
of Alice
Virgo acumen
at the table as yet

lumps of uranium
lumps of
lead

the tea in the pot
hitting a
level of sweetness
already heading
beyond dangerous

things
transforming across
this fantasy landscape
(your fault
reader, with
your alien chemistry and
catalyst fabulous)

and opium from the East
fresh from funding
colonial wars

there in this Wonderland
everywhere if
you
do know
where to look for it

cool for
quietening infants, deadening
assegaai wounds

heightening the pleasures of
your every
textual addiction

here in
this archetypal monarchy
where
power

parties day
and night, awake
asleep

speaks
in a dialect of allegory
that feels like
quintessence of
dreamworld
and simply sounds so strange

PARTY

mad hatter dude
is throwing a party
crimson locks
under scarlet hat
being
less than mag-
unanimous in
every
discussion
(all of them
shading into
existential struggle)

things
getting bad since
not a shred
of Alice
Virgo acumen
at the table as yet

lumps of uranium
lumps of
lead

the tea in the pot
hitting a
level of sweetness
already heading
beyond dangerous

things
transforming across
this fantasy landscape
(your fault
reader, with
your alien chemistry and
catalyst fabulous)

and opium from the East
fresh from funding
colonial wars

there in this Wonderland
everywhere if
you
do know
where to look for it

cool for
quietening infants, deadening
assegaai wounds

heightening the pleasures of
your every
textual addiction

here in
this archetypal monarchy
where
power

parties day
and night, awake
asleep

speaks
in a dialect of allegory
that feels like
quintessence of
dreamworld
and simply sounds so strange

TEAPOT

below
everybody’s radar

a fabulous world
bunkering
at the bottom
of your
white rabbit hole

and
after a divinity of
fine tea in the
arms of such company

time to reset
boot up
swipe
delete any virus
inconvenient program

waiting for
the bus of old age
who on Earth is
going to believe your story

the jury out
on whether the bus has
been missed, is late,
can
be said to exist

that debate
still raging, if ever
so quietly,

the luxury of it all
every tea set fully furnished,
expertly laundered

no future as monolithic
on the horizon, on
any horizon, as that
presents us as star child

not wishing to moonshine you
Cheshire Cat or Caterpillar you

you my dear girl
captured in this selfie
under the hat you
borrowed from
that mad
fellow

nothing in your sharp mind
going to change the heavy
metals in
his system to
gold

who single-
handedly threw
tea pot into unknown
postal district
this saucer into whole
new big bang aggrendisment
lurking in
galaxy not up
to us
to speak about

TABLE

the Cheshire Cat
is laughing

first the image
then the sound

and everybody jam-
bunned and ring
doughnutted around
the table

simultaneously think
eltromagnetic truth and
paradox
of quantum theory

how
if we accelerate particles
to speed of the sheer possible

the tea pot currently
hovering overhead

might be cajoled into
surrendering it secrets

something brewing in the air
right now
time not

as secure as we
assumed it might be

clocks recognising this
gone wayward
disintegrating

we did the Math to
work it out
got
a recurring decimal fractions
will never end

and most
imaginary or
imaginary numbers

TO SEED

AT ZERO GRAVITY

no soul

just
a hole

and me falling
fast out of
dense parent
childhood

like Alice
without
a parachute

until, trick
of physics

I hit
zero gravity

feeling myself
unplugged, unsupported

choice words
hurtling past me

seemingly from
pen and
paper from

the immortal
Ms Dickinson

and me
trying to catch,
hold onto that

before I go
meteor, comet,
full asteroid

burn up
in Wonderland’s
realm of
alternzte science

wild
surreal curved
atmosphere

YES YANIS

“the surreal colonizing the real”
Yanis Varoufakis

Columbus would have made it
if he had not traded
his ships in for jet skis
and surf boards

would have made it
to the Pacific
if he had not
stopped off in DC
to watch the
Army Navy game

his progress tracked
by GPS satellite, with
constant updates on
FOX, CNN and
alternate media
(outside Columbia and
MIT braves from
the seven nations having
set up
protest encampments)

Zadie so worried
whether her hypothetical
Zionist student would
not be bound
to feel aggrieved, suffer
horrific identity collapse

if hole in your vessel
easy to find a plug in DC
use a member of the house

the Hatter would tell Christopher
as the tenor got weirder
and the teapots all ran out
tea enough
still perhaps
after a previous party
floating in the harbour, but
for a great teapot at
this time of writing, a
wanderer did inform him,
you might
have to consult Boeing and
the military
industrial complex

Ah, the logic, the methodology,
suffice it to say, pure area 51
pure Man Ray,

pure
little girl without arms
bullet
through her head this
tale of Wonderland
is not about

you came to these shores and did
not expect to find palaces
did not expect to
encounter castles
golden dubloons maybe,
perhaps
a golden gate bridge

but not a landscape of
golf course and tenement
and cloud
saturated with capital

dodging those Lakota arrowheads

they said that
here there

would be no King
everybody would be a king
as
many kings on deck
as playing cards

Christopher somehow now
up in the Rockies inside
the Overlook Hotel

ghostly overseer Stanley
whispering in his ear
an adage that
colonization is

the heart
of the horror

colonization
the name
of the original sin

Yes, Yanis
still waiting for the cartoon
version of what I scribbled
down here

have commissioned Salvador Dali
have pleaded with Picasso