Empire – poems 2 die for

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

SO MUCH BETTER FOR IT

When the great
god Emperors
go juggernaut

it will
ss always

be poetry
that suffers

and there we see Ovid
the pornogrpher
banned from Rome
languishing in exile

the great Julisn
city of Augustus
now so much better for it.

IN MEMORIAM

GENERAL DIRECTION

my nose, proverbially,
close to the ground
keeping me grounded

blown by
the wind
chasing the Sun
I wandered around the farm

remembering my Hobbes’
theme of the brutish and short
life without sovereign authority
implicit social contract

recalling my Plato notion
of the ethical and philosophical
supremacy of
his ruling class

somehow I
slunk back into my idealism
thought
should stick
with democracy on
(on this hallowed day
of election)

choose
Dionysus above Apollo this
and every day

not to speak of those first
communities of the faith
before
religion got Roman

this issue
of the State
will twist you every
which way

from
state of being, to
highest states imaginable

to Empires of suffering
that we all know too well

from YouTube and TikTok
and old apartheid memories

so much in
this mindset still
needs exorcism I guess

but the green of the farm
so gleeful, intense
after this sudden splurge
of rainfall

everything gaining height
growing (forgive my
ethnocentrism) out
of its socks

gaining height, accumulating mass
giving my theme here
weight
sudden addition of
gravity

as is the general direction
(for this stage
at least
whilst
time decrees it last)

PANIC LITE

PANIC LITE.

moral panic
Janet!

something in your pants
something wriggling
in your panties

threatening every
aspect of your identity

have to go
airtight, watertight
totally clamp down

if no one can
breathe
how do you hope
to
however can
you expect to

guide the world
to the light
(nothing we fear
more than your light)

****

moral
panic, Janet!

let’s not forget
those who began it

COLUMBINE

we came across
a fallen city

at its heart
there was
a labyrinth

and at
the heart of this
labyrinth
there was a demon

very little of
this culture,
this society remains
not enough to
give a reasonable
picture of
what they were like
the people
who lived here

except we are
pretty sure
we can infer
they were
extremely militaristic

and, perhaps
in the fear that
the shadow of
their conquests
engendered

conducted
savage sacrifices
of the youth
who perhaps tried
in vain to suggest
more peaceful ways

SERVED

OVID IN EXILE

in the Senate
on the Forum

they are not talking about it
no one is talking about it
Ovid
is in exile

the young Emperor
Augustus, formerly Octavian,
friend to the poets, patron of the arts

has blotted his copybook,
sent Ovid
into exile

no headlines, not a
scrap of graffiti
to record this event

too much truly momentous
on the horizon
to let this
sublime moral moment
undercut, let alone
overshadow
the great transformation

civil war over
the Caesar legacy entrenched
for who knows how long,
even the most conservative guess
will kick off with
a century or two, a good
few centuries

an Empire has been born
and Ovid missed its birth
for Ovid
is out of town

and, to be honest, who
really cares,
gives a damn about the impact
of this on his poetry

lately become
what was promised, always
promised

as the statues go up
to enshrine the new image

Ovid is in exile
and Rome and its fictions
transformed as expected
continue to be

STALEY BRIDGE STALYBRIDGE

this is Staley bridge
my father’s birthplace

here is a picture
of me in a pram
my sister
in a pram

on a big bridge
crossing the Tame river

this is not
that Staley bridge where
the Saxons crushed the
Vikings
rushing back to

meet my
Norman ancestors at Hastings

and we
know what happened there

****

Yes, here we are
up front Mossley
in that picture, my
Mother

daughter of a war hero
pushing our pram

and there, no doubt,
the great cotton mills
still
doing their job though
not now in
their hey day

postmodernity,
postcoloniality

what landscape altering modes
of production ushered
in in
their wake

and here is Engels incliding
text on this place in his seminal
work on
the working class
in England

and here I am
years later, studying satire living
in his monument house
in Oxford Street Manchester

water
under this bridge, water
connecting
us all
Tipperary, Stalybridge,
Mahikeng South Africa

figures
in a Lowry paintimg
they come
and they go

water
    under this bridge then
so much water we
tend to
   forget about
                        water headed
to the port of slavery

same water in the skiffle
psychedelia of those

Sergeant Pepper people
magicians of the airwaves
conjurors of
                        a whole new
line
    in identity
fruit of the clash of
working class proclivities
with
    transcendental
mind

clash, I say,
but what a melding, beloved
blending

without which
no way this space, or place,
or room
to talk

gone these guys
or finally fading

gone
those mills of my childhood
Spitfire stories
of how
we stood alone

everything reconfigured,
outright repurposed

voices (and their words)
I fail to recognise, alien
strange

elevated above whilst
so out of frame

somehow talking all
necessities of suppression
commandeering everything

stretching

the distance below
to above

to breaking point

viewed from
the Southern tip of Africa, product
victim of
all that this is metonym of
all this place
this life
of which
I speak

ths
shock
could not be more
extreme

(so dark
these river with
their druid name

we cross
all our lives

each
every day

so quietly all
determining)

AWAY

friendly fire kills
without any
bad intentions

its bullets and bombs
morally superior

but let us pause
for a moment here
for establishing shot
and then
extensive tracking

as we go for
metaphor and
superimposition

passing all those broken
riddled statues
of Mary
and the Christ

in search of a man
called Wilfred, dead now
but formerly a captain

machine-gunned within
sight of peace and an
end of the war

correction, apologies, end
of the war to end all wars

pity we are late
for he was the all-
time expert in battlefield elegy

thinking
of butchered aid workers
he would know
what to write

he would know
what words to kill the lie
sweep away
convenient narrative

a Britsh poet himself
already long-forgotten
the art of a true-blue
true-
blooded imperial culture
to sweep such things away