Tag Archives: Empire

A GENTLER TIME

A GENTLER TIME

a gentler time
when tectonic plates
scoffed at and shunned
the very idea
Earth’s hot core
was still ripe with satire,
high science comedy

this, long before,
no floating feeling
downtown Pompeii
benign
   shadow of Vesuvius

who could guess it
mountain volcano
tell the difference, spell
out the betwixt
and between

everything
gentle peaceful at
the gladiator school
in the working class quarters
from high to
low,
paterician and slave
in this quiet day
amongst days
(one more
to chalk up to
glorious Empire)

we dug them up
preserved as
spaces
    shapes
holes in the ash

snapshot of how
they lived, selfie of
how they died

killer punchline:
the truth
of that comedy
not to be denied

OVID

OVID

the pompous Patriots
scoreless
at half time

Seattle (smart city)
with their
blitzkrieg football
acing it
in our own
back yard

meanwhile
between Oz and Kansas
the corn still growing
as spears go, every
clutch of corn
by
rank and file
deep as a legion
tall as
a phalanx

but Empire troubled
by what it sees
out at half
time
rapping in Spanish
(language
closest to Latin)

worse, singing about
love and
community
not
fish, beer, trucks
and dogs
as quintessential
song lexicon

and preserving a
language
for the sake of
ablatives, declensions
and gender

spoke as it
are

vestal
as a virgin

from
the horse’s mouth

(the Empire that
gave us
Spartacus
also giving us Ovid)

STARBOARD

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

GENERAL DIRECTION

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

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

OVID IN EXILE

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