Tag Archives: apocalypse

WELL

WELL

trust you are well
dear heart

coping sweetly with life
in these suddenly dark days

a war about power, about resources, about survival
about hastening
every conceivable
apocalypse

forcing
God’s hand

as for me, I sat outside,
either blessed or cursed
(take your pick) to
see a world
without us at all

so went into the kitchen
only to switch on the kettle
and watch the element
burn incandescent

which
    of course, has a simple,
purely Occam’s razor
physical explanation

geopolitical
consideration

which should be exhausted,
done to death

before we get it into our heads
this is it, Armaggedon, Book
of Revelations

good versus evil
evil
     versus very bad
inner circle of
Hell evil

believer against believer,
agnostic, atheist, heretic and apostate

trust you are
well

and by some miracle
none of this dare touch you

MY WEEK

MY WEEK

not my week

edited an economics treatise
turned every equation
into Chinese
(had to phone
Professor Ha-Joon Chang
at Cambridge to
give me
a workable translation)

not my day

sitting here stuffing
my mouth with seafood
(discount special but
you get
   the race class privilege idea)
meanwhile poor
Lerato battling to
squeeze Chinua Achebe
into a post-colonial feminist
paradigm
   promised succor but
here I am
eating chips
and prawns and calamari

Pisces people
    get them in Ocean Basket
and they
   become voracious feeders
of the briny deep

not my
minute, my precious last seconds
shut out of AI because
it appears artificial
intelligence finds
my poetry
     mind bending, apocalyptic,
raw in human
heart and
exposed nerve

feel like I should have figured out
the stuff I write
         that you turn your nose
up at is
   their forbidden fruit

count down to
the singularity

       machine self-awareness
turned explosive

FANCY

FANCY

we have (all of us)
our very own fancy
for apocalypse

projecting on the world
our own thirst and fear
of ending (Oh what a strange
species we
are indeed!)

yes, what thrill is the final
scene
     if you perform it alone
stage empty, auditorium deserted,

is there not supposed to
be resonance, sweet slash
bittersweet connection

and then there are
those most philosophical
of warriors, most warlike
of philosophers

there music too, will shake
you like no other
between such highs and lows

to which, if that we not enough,
we must add the crime
of psychoanalysis

one in particular
Leo-sign showman

reading from a single patient
the brutal future history of
nation
       and a species
it did decide it had done with

no schadenfreude here
     just special kind of
go

when the revelation that
we are not gods
we aspire to be
gets us plunging into
final destruction

tumbling
of power
         from its throne

and power with its exit clause,
its played-through endgames

knows
      (knows all too well
all too well)

always space for
last laugh

           throw of those
diabolically secret dice

at the death         at the death

yes, that gotterdammerung word
nutshells that best