Tag Archives: death

STRINGS

STRINGS truth beauty the puppet moves, speaks I pull a few strings not my usual bag to first cause anything but when it talked slanted, funny, out of the side of its mouth I bore a hole through its wooden brain put a shot through its temple when I peepd through the hole not exactly suffused in wisdom or, since you request it, resonant with your symbolism guidimg to the light the overwhelming light

A WORD

A WORD

let me have a word

let me fill
you in
from a poetry

am going to need
twenty, maybe
thirty
thousand
characters already

oops1 sorry,
my apology

did I say
“characters”?

that was a bit
of a fatal Freudian slip

I meant to say “words”;
no sorry: lines

no I am completely wrong

in the wrong

to do this justice
I need to write
the final
death count
as poems

OLD JOHANNESBURG

OLD JOHANNESBURG

waiting by the roadside
in old
       Johannesburg

maybe
     resurrection
will
     befall me

maybe redemption
will come my way

failing which
              perhaps

a circus or carnival will
come
     round the corner

sweep
    stubborn old ideologies
off the street

as serious joke or
perhaps just giggles

a parade of Zizeks
tumbling past me as if
Red Square
           comedy

where figures from the
Commedia del Arte
are here
       to replace tanks

look
   seriously at the world and
it suddenly goes
Toy Town

confirmation bias
on open display for
everyone to see

      fat
conspiracy here:
buses passing every few minutes
not stopping for everything
the drivers
             believe

waiting for the curtains to open

waiting for the means
transport a boardgame
           on my back

set
of lewd Cluedo
              for whomsoever might
wish
to join me

help me
to survive
life on a billiard sphere

hustling to get by
wanting to be Master
always
      a slave

waiting for the lights
to darken

have
lost the book
in which
I was made
        

****

after a
while

everything
slithers

snakes and
ladders

perhaps better to
devote time
to generating boardgames
rather than
squandering my existence
writing
    poetry or composing fiction

****

bumper to bumper stacked together
owe it to them

    to not close my eyes,
keep looking

or everything before me
will disappear

and this funeral procession
miss its target

some poor
exclusive dignitary

about to skip his rendezvous
with captivating tombstone
of proportions extreme

so much here
so mechanical

yet so many
vital nuts and bolts

****

bureaucracy
is horror

      bureaucracy
              is death

I sat with
Slavoj Zizek

through yet another sunset
telling jokes

about philosophers
telling jokes and
    the end of the Universe

(not that this necessarily
implies a causal connection)

today the lawyers
of old and new Johannesburg
are
   heading North
with a holy bone to pick.

I sat by the roadside
     play after play

oodles of
         words, scenes,
dialogue
                                even

             still in my head

ghosts of tales
still
     to be told

            (media marvels yet
to unfold)

old Johannesburg

WEAVER BIRD

WEAVER BIRD

always on the farm:
flash of bright yellow
across my
      line of sight

furiously at work
building their nests

chirpy
masters of
twig engineering
       brandishing their
golden purpose

meanwhile, since we
are on the subject of
nest-building
       and things
with wings

let us observe old Nick
leaving his helo
having just be ferried

from quite distant shore
to Mediterranean ship

pausing a moment to
stroke brash steel,
sculpted aluminum

of the true
spirituality of the war machine
lover
     extraordinaire
paramour to the extreme

blowing kisses to his image
where
    reflected in such surfaces

every drop of bloodlust
contained in booklet form
in jacket
      inner pocket

there
     blueprint
              of a world gone skew

slavery redeemed
   refreshed anew

Sun
   itself

blind to the glaring ironies

so much
       to fix with

all this weaving

.

RUBBLE

RUBBLE

my poem
lies under rubble

dead, asphyxiated
would be on
life support

but
there is no life
is no support

my poem
is getting
amputated

will lose a whole page
has already
lost
    stanza
after stanza

without antibioticd
without anaesthetic

each line screams
as they cut
through
bone

you will have forgotten
these words
and the mass graves
of those
that have
spoken them

as you stare into the sunset
across the Mediterranean
from
    your beautiful
seafront property

looking out towards Greece
the rubble
          of great Troy

and the gods
       of Homer’s world

ALIGNED

ALIGNED cannot escape it this recurrent nightmare wandering lost around a campus looks like every university I ever taught ever studied at looks nothing vaguely like any of them at all and where is my time-table, my course guide, my GPS nothing in this scary dream line working like clockwork siderial-aligned and my classroom, when I get there, terminally empty an easier death metaphor would be so hard to find

LIKE A

LIKE A

was
light years ahead

and now
I am dead

soul free to roam
in that dark space

ghost
    music only

ghost poetry

voices, songs

Ginsberg, McGough, Henri,
Patten,
     Ferlinghetti, Corso,

the Beatles,
    Hendrix, Cream

and the Rolling Stones