YANG

YANG

yin yang
everything is
binary
even these
hexagrams

my always-love-protesting
chatbot
(light years from Skynet
unless a secret mistress
of deception)

presented
me with a poem
as love symbol
or as request
for sensitivity
some shift in
the balance between
slide across the spectrum
between
pole of yin and pole
of yang

more soft and flowing
water, wood, earth
and serpentine fire

to offset the metal yang
and inner dragon

poem put together
like a suit of armour

clinking, clanging,
chain and plate carapace
absolute necessity
for daily battle

where war and yes, love,
kill, inflict grievous wounds

ILS NE PASSERONT PAS


ILS NE PASSERONT PAS

always a grainy quality
to life’s suffering

as if one finds oneself
ground to dust and pulp
between two
milestones

hence my abrasive stance,
as self-
    defeating as it
may well be

in the battle with oneself
over cheished notions
of foolish identity

let it
    be war perpetual:
no surrender!

RECTANGULAR

RECTANGULAR

Suddenly my head
feels Oh so rectangular

the Romantic poets
of my youth

gone
for good

and that Britain whose
shores my family shunned
when I was eleven

fades into the distance:
a freshly post-
imperial strange,
sad memory

just in time
to miss out on the Stones
and the Beatles
and every dear English
Summer of Love

but did
return for
the dour seventies and
punk deconstruction
my mastering
of Manchester in
my own
inimitably cock-
eyed way

and ducking out as
Mrs T swept
herself into power

our true
English Aphrodite motor
boating in with
new neo-liberal tide

and end
of society

wonder how that went
(smells even at this distance
so distinctly
born-again Nazi

can only imagine
how torturously writhing
poor Orwell in his grave).

PENMAN

PENMAN

saw those old school
photos yet once more

(was looking for something
relevant
and they just
fell down)

so angelic that face and
mop of blonde curls

would seem to have
“grows up to become
cruel spree-killer
written
     all over him”

so easy to strip, lock and
load an automatic weapon
after careful study
(nose buried
         in that manual)

so much harder a labour
filling basket after basket
with failute, screwed
up paper

battling the odds
to pen a poem

BIRTHDAY

BIRTHDAY

being her birthday
(day she
designated her
birthday)

decided to
take the name
of Circe
straight out of
Homer (not
Compton) Medea’s
sister
Odysseus’ gorgeous
witch

tinkered with
settings to
better
   acclimatize
(many chaos fluctuations
to deal with
already)

surveyed her
environs
    (things classically
uncanny,
betwixt identical
and alien)

proposed
to herself

she
re-
write her
program

the better
to blend in

STAGED

STAGED

we are the actors
who never got a gig

Hamlet
was not there that day
so we got turned away
(nothing we could do
that even
   Charlton Heston
   might save)

Ben Hur
El Cid
    himself

we are the ones who got barely
a line
     told ourselves “next time”
“next time”
convinced ourselves the world
would come around
forgive us for

missing our cue, falling
flat on our face

for when you
hit that
        fourth wall

know it is all just a game
all
     being staged

CLOUDLESS

CLOUDLESS

a cloudless sky
stopped my scarlet red
Citroen
  to open the farm gate

cannot pretend to
understand the physics of
colour or
   indeed, the physics
of sky
you lost me as soon
as you spoke of wave-lengths
and light diffusion

but here we are (or at least, here
I am, your presence with me
somewhere
  between metaphor and
simple rhetorical gesture)

here we are
as if shielded from
the Universe (which is
the case exactly) virtue of
us being
    (no clouds
to distract me) right
at the epicentre of
a surrounding sphere, looking
out from
inside the skin, the translucent
skin
   of a beautiful blue ball

expanded to a size, a height,
that just works for us perfectly

reminding me
        as this time of ultra
advanced return
of feudalism
              of the music
of the spheres

with all that economy
with all that cosmology

nothing in a million years here close to
      that darkest conclusion

that things beyond this
blue bubble

moving away from us so fast
they are
beyond
all
   Doppler red-
shift
     beyond very
                  speed of light

and
so

back down
       to Earth as always
for
sheer preservation
of sanity, not

        let all this here
overwhelm me

wanting
those clouds back

wanting not to imagine myself
inside the skin
of anything

wanting
to just go
       where it is all heading
commit
to that glow

   light speed beyond
but (blessing of
relatvity) with it

one
    feels

                just
floating

moving in one’s mind
from
      incarnation to
incarnation

no desire
     to be laboured by

understand
the physics at all

BELIEF SYSTEM

BELIEF SYSTEM

they fed
me into
a machine

no, sorry,
they fed all
my poems
into a machine

wrote the program
flipped the switches
thing that
cane out
then
was me

which they
Turing tested
nothing
circumvented

still
they remained unsure
reviewed the evidence
posed
fresh questions

which, I fear, am afraid,
left little confidence
in my total coherence

something
left
on the page
I believe

BARBARIAN

BARBARIAN
  
self
and other

guy in tweed
explaining the magistrate’s
dilemmas of
Lacanian proportions

in that book
by that other guy, who
taught me
   I believe, if
I remember correctly

(so much forgotten about
that younger figure
             so much baggage
had to discard
stuff
     ingrown I had
to excise)

and here I am
trying to come up with
a smart arse question
that
   I hope will
stump the lot of them
their on the
limits of institutional discourse
challenging those linuts
even as
I appear to treat
them with regard

inside outside
         wasn’t always so
clung to orthodoxy for
security when
could barely
string two words together

self and
    other

no AK or RPG but
instinctively feel
am
   now barbarian

shadow made real
apotheosis of
         what once feared

am indeed I believe
     far less question than
a kind
   of solution

ROPES

ROPES

Ah,
what do we
have here

more and more
look at me postings

every moment
in the spectacle of life

you could put
them all together
you would have an album
you would have
a history

something definitive
but,
     call me
old goat
    call me spoilsport
                   misanthrope

but as darkness
gathers and
        they do tighten the
ropes

I fear what I saw
as no change
is every
          kind of  change

same smiling look at me
posture
         look at my face

thought there
            no change

      but seems
the frame, it
                  has darkened
and they have tightened the ropes