Tag Archives: loss

DIAMONDS


DIAMONDS

before I knew it
my life had
for better
  or for worse

gone
full mythological

Homer had
      fallen from the heavens
down on
my ten year old
                  head

and Aphrodite, my god,
how that goddess killed me
then
    thereafter
and every day since

if not in
divine form, then with
the active collusion
of her
   clones and copies
and would-be
avatars

each as gorgeous as
they were fake

but you
      were the one
she must have chosen
specially

      inner outer beauty
got in
hearts, diamonds, spades
(and so
    your namesake
did
   sing of diamonds)

time has passed on
but the poem
                      won’t
forget

SUPER BOWL POEM


SUPER BOWL POEM

woke up
in time to hold off
on the SuperBowl result

worst fears confirmed when
I summoned up courage
to check

    yep Brock loves God
but Brock loves
Patrick Mahomes

(does not seem
to care much about
Head Coach Kyle Shanahan)

and at this
        juncture, out of the blue,
an unruly host of
archetypes made their move
wanted to stick
         around a bit, get
the lie
   of the land in the process
of passing through me

a mad mosaic it was
for a while

      many shapes and
sizes, manners and
demeanours

     jostling up against each other
(Brownian motion)
          excanging, debating,
doing their
dialectic dance, analysis
synthesis
no homogenizing

and there I was in a carnivalesque dream

chatting to the players in
St Francis’ kingdom
of those elevated
                    high above
the realms
of material wealth

peering into the abyss that
a philosopher cum psychologist
had laid
      before me

a tablet broken with the
entire script jagged

and there on the road
a burnt out humvee

and there in the docks
a rusting destroyer

archetypes at home within
settling
     for a game of solitaire

and me
thinking, wondering,
      who does have a
prophetic bone in this
my body

is winning everything?
    and if it is not

will there ever
indeed

      be an end to war?



GIMME

GIMME

world’s
falling apart

little children
getting blown
to
   smithereens

so gimme that
sweet false consciousness
that would come
with a
    SuperBowl victory

don’t let Mahomes
spoil everything
with
    an insane overtime
charge

this after Kyle left
his best laid plans
in a briefcase
in the
    locker room

this is not
   the script I want,
I need

so write me a new one
bring me that
thick syrupy delusion
that a Niners’
Vegas victory
          would bring

the world falling apart
                         bits
of little
children

how come I always get
             caught this way

how come
I’m not
         so smart
                   

A WORD

A WORD

let me have a word

let me fill
you in
from a poetry

am going to need
twenty, maybe
thirty
thousand
characters already

oops1 sorry,
my apology

did I say
“characters”?

that was a bit
of a fatal Freudian slip

I meant to say “words”;
no sorry: lines

no I am completely wrong

in the wrong

to do this justice
I need to write
the final
death count
as poems

LIKE A

LIKE A

was
light years ahead

and now
I am dead

soul free to roam
in that dark space

ghost
    music only

ghost poetry

voices, songs

Ginsberg, McGough, Henri,
Patten,
     Ferlinghetti, Corso,

the Beatles,
    Hendrix, Cream

and the Rolling Stones

THAT WILLIAM BLAKE CHARACTER

THAT WILLIAM BLAKE CHARACTER

saw that William
Blake character
on social media

disagreed about the war
had a few sharp words

fresh from this exchange
looked him up
found
   not a word on Wikipedia
save a reference to a character
in a Jim Jarmusch film

which seriously flustered me
for I had got this notion
into my head
   about this far from prototypical
radical
      early nineteenth century
English Romantic poet

but seems it is all a myth, a false flag,
huge disinformation

which 
     stands to reason,
for if there were really
a Songs of Innocence and
a Songs of Experience

think how
different the world would be

ALONG

UK OK (not so very)

        still solid
    (courtesy of Victorian
architecture)

crazy high aquaducts
    (now exactly what
               do they do?)

university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
    returned from
south africa

settler colonial
(apartheid to
           god knows who else
and me
and you)

but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?

how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
     force-fed gloom

red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
     most exploitative

see your politicians now
scared at the thought
                               people

might
     have their
                       own ideas

university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
                 taught me something
about the
    economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
                    the previous tenants)

anarchy
OK OK    strawberries
spoiled, by
                      this time
was
          the late 70s

ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
                                  and I’ll
imagine
            in falsetto

less than happily singing along