loss – poems 2 die for

TRIAL

thought you
would love me
if I were
brave as Achilles

had a body like
Apollo’s
not a blemish
not a scar

if I could
sing like Sting,
Robert Plant or
Pavoratti

or riff
like Django or
Jimi Hendrix
on the guitar

if I could speak
French faultlessly,
seductively, and
then write
like Proust
or Rimbaud

had the intellect of
Derrida and
the wit
of Oscar Wilde

and all this childhood trauma
that I carry with me
this toxic
family stuff
inside

you would love me
once I found
the instant
total cure for it

or battling and failing
to shake it, negate it,
integrate it
shape it
to true loving ends

you
would love me
for how hard I tried

POEM FOR 1983 ME (revised version)

POEM FOR 1983 ME

there you are
in that disintegrating photograph
so sure of yourself
Mr Wry Smile, so unsure of
yourself : deconstruct
this photo Professor Academic
Expert
so much space here
to delineate those inner doubts
and (to make no bones
about it) existential torments
scars of neglect

and what eyes have browsed this?
looked here, remembered,
eyes have looked into,
souls loved, have loved,
still love
could never
possibly forget
(know who you are, know
what history we have,
stuff
shared together)

and now having
pulled this out of the hat
my next trick
will be
one of disappearance
taking all this stuff of self
off the shelf
go Cheshire Cat on you all
(having at times
threatened to
go full
mad hatter

perhaps in truth, far more Alice
caught right there
before the door into Wonderland
crazy. divine, nonsensical
quantum who
knows what
Wonderland

battling to balance
medicine that makes me
too big medicine
renders me too small

she
of the sign of the Libra born
most loved of the beloved
quietly shaking
her head at this point

and you
who only yesterday
told me
to come visit

hit me
with all that goddess mythology
made everything
look so
effortless

what fatal nonsense
was it our paths crossing

what fatal
nonsense was it
nothing and not
everything, all?

ALL APIECE

“Seven days in sunny June/long
enough to bloom/ the flowers on that sunbeam dress you wore
in Spring.” Jamiroquai

Can’t believe
they called a flower
“honeysuckle”

begs
the question, what were
they thinking?

that’s real
bower of bliss. midsummer
night’s dream stuff

all apiece
with
lords and, ladies. fairies
and mechanicals doing
their thing
prancing around

which beats
sharing a melting icecream
with Doja Cat and
Slavoj Zizek

fanning myself,
taking a break away from
finding myself
always haunted by
sublime
prospect of
things
before my very eyes
turning from real
to surreal
to hyper-
real

nothing every returning
to braveface the real

as Janet croons
seductively to inform us
regarding
the nature of love and
its, inevitable destiny

must have
been brain dead to
love
as I did for
so many years

can’t believe
they called it “honeysuckle”
to my mind that
for better
or for worse

in sickness or in health,
really takes the cake

OF ORPHEUS

nothing stopped
slowed down

the clockwork
kept running

Hermes
on time with
all the crucial mail

and lacking all hiatus
the merest suggestion
of a frozen moment

flesh and
spirit
finding themselves divided
wondered how the
world could
yet
be green

time ticking and my lyre
learning of this
to spite
every serpent, in the main
those deadly
in their venom

refused to play, eschewed
all that can
plug in, be electric

and me looking back
not eyes dead ahead on
the road to
consummate
my love

should have them glued
sold my limbs on the dream
of finally
your touch

for real
not in this most
central of myths, key
to our
entire mythology

ultimate heart of
every lost dream

PARALLELOGRAM

there are some
(maybe one, at
a, stretch , two)
parallel realitues
where we

were lovers
and flowing out of that some
small differences,
divergences
of no real cosmic consequence

but this one is ulterior;
this one
is so so
different

this one
does not look
like our Earth
and we do not
even look
human

though
Earth and human
it well, we well,
both maybe be

and this language
we are, speaking does it have
could it
support
poetry

best thing about it though
from our currently
could not
be
nore massively involved condition

no word
for no
that
defining word

in all those parallel
alternate words
where
our levels ran disjunct,
separate, distant

shadowing me, shadowing
that one of which
I was
speaking

sharing
with you

this very first,
last last time

LITTLE

I knew so little
understood so little

read page
upon page but
nothing stuck
nothing sank in

lost everything, all hope
in that insane five minutes
with you
in your car

at Salt River Station
you told me brutally
bluntly you
did want to get involved
but here you are
your fingers desperate
out of control
all over me

suddenly, and me blind to it,
like some witness wonder in
an Achean tragedy
not seeing
this mirroring of
desire
for what it is

falling
out of love for you
for the briefest most
killing
of moments

but there we are
years later
words spoken
memories on the table

edging towards each other
warily, uncomfortably,
uncertain of
our certainties

and the swansong
only in a dream

me in your car thrown back
by g force this thing
propelled by a rocket
redlining
skimming the
rooves of the
city precincts before

heading into deep space
only place where love between
us
such as it is
could ever be

TINCTURE

tincture of something
on my tongue

hard to place it
need to pin
it down exactly

outside the world its
raucous self, perhaps
even
more cantankerous maybe

we talk softly therefore
defining our demeanor.
quietly desperate not
to say the wrong thing
feeling our
way towards acceptance,
adjustment

we wonder if this could be
the same small bustling cafe
from all
those years ago

and if we would be doomed
or maybe fortunate enough
to enter into
the same debate

as to whether what
we are eating today
is canneloni or
lasagna
how we see now that
time before when
we almost
shared love

so close we were but
such a gap between us
in our mutual
understanding
of the codes and syntax
governing
offers and
suggestion

so much lost though
perhaps here we are again
in disagreement

could there be
any “if onlys” that we
actually do share

the ghosts of that love and
metaphysical questions
raising the hypothesis that
ghosts
could be lovers

so much here the same
so much that has changed

DRUG OF THE DAY

had my blood
my innocent O neg
syphoned, extracted,
replaced
with King Crimson

planted beds of magic
mushrooms
in the furrows
of my brain

symbolism
being my currency;
mythology my game

was ’69 a Rooster year
and Yasgur’s farm
Hendrix blitzkrieg anthem
and Carlos wrestling
with his
snake guitar
channeling the cosmos
raw, unfiltered

and me sitting in a library
in apartheid South Africa
sweet
sixteen
reading Plato (had
to start somewhere)

desire for a truth mystical
not yet a droll dream

keys
being pushed on
my mellotron keyboard

swirling with tune samples
and snippets of ideas

heart beat be
a drum but could
it do
a hard rock solo?

stuck
on the turntable of life

I watched you undress
slip into bed

wondering
my whole life wondering

was it
beyond me, your
nuance of invitation?

THE LINGERING

the sadness
of never knowing you
the real you

always looking
from the outside
seeing the people
you are close to

and this
I show you now
is that image of you
I hold onto, keep
in my heart

Oh if
I could just relive
that captured moment

feel once more
feel once more

those small, exquisite, endearing joys
that deep, sublime, long-
lasting,
lingering pain

KOI (for G.)

hope this message
reaches you somehow

just to kick off
the world has become a darker
place since you departed
odds on now
we are going
to wipe ourselves out
in nuclear war

stopped by your old place
much had changed, your
inimitable spirit and vibe
long departed
and I thought of
your fish, those koi
gliding through their pond
in your front garden

had a conceit of myself
speaking to them but
they did
not appear to hear any voice
or I must gave missed their answer
sound travelling air to water
one medium
to another

who knows what get’s heard,
distorted, filtered out?

what message is received
what gets missed and
travels on and
on
destined to expire or
carry on forever

life still chugging along
a flash of silver scales
beneath
the surface

I wonder how they saw you
   how much
         they remember now