humanity – Page 10 – poems 2 die for

C2

OVERKILL

OVERKILL
“Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.”
Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy
(poem on the Peterloo Massacre)

Ah, my beauties
here is poetry
where it has always been

first past the post
(postmodern, pissedmodern,
posttruth, postnuclear,
postapocalyptic, post-
whasoever)

play of language: you realize
of a sudden that deep
down in
your tin heart
you have to prevent it

look at the danger: exhibit A,
very drowned poet

his young pregnant wife
dreamt the future as monster
private parts monster
(as they all are)
scratching at her window
demanding
life, consciousness,
not exactly Turing tested but

she scared
the life out of us, this
virgin snake did cosmically,
with what
ex machina she
duly came up with

such overkill
need to nip it in the bud
radical danger of metaphor
surely
needs its own -dectomy

the threat of crucifixion
along every highway
and byway
resurrected again

something the billboards
really need, are crying out
for

real spectacle
behind them.

THERE

feel you must be starved
so, disingenuously,
I offer you this poem

not sure how
life-sustaining
it will be (into
what food groups
do they fall:
metaphors, wordplay,
similes, images,
ink, paper?)

but
the thought is there

with poetry
the thought
should always be
there

here there
there here

what use
is anything
bereft of care?

GIANT

how
absolute om
evil is
survival oriented

one shiver, shake,
slight seriousness
in planetary wobble

and all darkness
leaches out

stuff
that ice worlds, dead
rock planets
are all made of

not to speak
of the huge death narcissism
of every
gas giant

WEREN’T WE?

weren’t we
supposed to hold
up the mirror
to human nature

not let it fall
splinter, shatter

crash and burn, break
into a billion tiny
diamond-bright pieces

jagged shards, blood
soaked, blood
painted, bloody

never to be fixed
never
to be returned
never reclaimed
never restored

all those bits of light
dancing in the Sun grotesquely

hold
up the mirror
to human nature

who the fuck, nowhere
near his right mind
came up
with that idea

(go not pass go
leave the planet
sail steadfast, venture into the cosmos
cross
the galaxy

not, never
in a trillion lifetimes

nothing out there
to mirror what
we
might well be)

weren’t we?

WHEN IT KILLS

“As with many tragedies, our story opens in a moment of triumph.”

Dan Jones, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

Now we
see

how deep indeed
this story goes

how sure
the colour
in the rose

of itself
in every detail

its thorns
the truth
of its beauty’s cruelty

the colour
fixed on absolute
when
it kills.

RECALLING MR POPE

sound
echoing sense

but what if there
is no sense

rule of your nonsense
Mr Pope
descending into
the entropy
of brute power

I decline
to add

for why say anything
when gets so grossly filtered

crushed by the imposition
superimposition
of hideous, ruling
mythology

under which stone rubble
words die, asphyxiate
cannot breathe

AND SO

and so;
God showed Job
the small things
of the Universe
the fine
print

of his creation
as they
walked together
across the smouldering ruins
the fields of ash

the huge expression
catastrophic to
a fault
of those

who refuse
to see
who
do not read

BATTLEFIELD

butterfly
fluttered over

the battlefield
trench war
combined arms
cyber war

tanks
versus chlldren

butterfly was looking
for someome, anyone
to give some
kind of explanation

but we
are humanity

we kill in the name of
all we hold dear

incapable of
the art of transormation

COPERNICAN SYSTEM REVISITED

tellers of tales
doctors of spin

can get smothered
strangled in
all that
yarn

this
how the world demands
we do not
turn
eschew
revolution

history freeze
take
everything as it
comes, it falls

without (us) and
out of the blue, within