love – poems 2 die for

WHOLESALE

Saw you
with your lover
said “hello”
took
a photo
of me
the two of you
did

sent it
to me and
am looking
at it now

no longer
your wholesale admirer
but nevertheless
trying to
recall your
perfume

we were
both young then
vibrant, insouciant

so much
in love with each other
but not
at the same time.

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?

POEM FOR 1983 ME

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

LABOUR OF LOVE

we are
so unlike

she creates landscapes
has always had
her head
screwed
on tight

sees
the picture
implements
the dream

no place, space
for irony, ambiguity
sudden shift
back and forth

between
high and low
East
and West
North and
South
inside, outside
nightmare and dream

this very enterprise
premised on
shift and change,
subtlest suggestion
fluctuation

ah, yes
there we are, out
of nowhere had to
just
stumble upon it

world’s apart these practices,
so entirely alien
to each other

labours of love
for us both

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

BACK THEN

everybody was
listening to
Dylan
back then

and me
stumbling around
like an idiot
so much
in love you

how could I
feel
this
so exclusively

how could it
infest, invest
me
so completely?

maybe I was getting
a precious sense of this
via all
these Dylan songs

oil and water
different oceans
creatures from
different planets

and now
on different continents

still some
strange, sad exchanges
between us

destined
to separate lives

TALKING DESIGN

Chomsky being currently out of commission
dunno who is going to
explain to me

whether love
is transitive
or intransitive verb

and then,
as regarding the word
as substantive
is it here
by design or
off the cuff a thing
we just
make?

and talking design
blue prints, project management,
where are
we exactly now as
everything
ebbs and
flows?

time not just elastic
but a kind
of liquid

I have felt that before
and,
Occam’s razor aside,
do believe it confirmed

inside outside
don’t spook me out
with talk of wall to
wall
consciousness
sloshed around
like buckets of whitewash

yes
talking of design

why were we not all created,
designated, love engineers,
exquisite
mechanics of pleasure

so much in our specs (as
sent out
into deep space)
to have us believe this
well within our range

EXPERIMENTAL

experimental
mental

banking on
une chanson l’amour

a kind of magic
watch my hands
each a little
imp
of diversion
distraction

beneath the city
beneath the mountain

going nebula
creating
(that is
the theory at least)
special connection, entanglement,
new pathways

kind of comical pondering
this nothing
is real reality
that is emerging

big box
of paradox
tied up
with a rainbow bow

and there we were
the two of us blessed cursed
to live a
life of standard fare

not a shred
of resonance between us

just
that initial shockwave
wave, particle

positive, negative, opposite
identical spin

who
would have hazarded
a guess at it?

what
were the odds?

INVOCATION

It was my optimum desire
to forward you an invocation

and tell you (in an appendix)
that you should genuinely
feel free to deploy it
as you see fit

but I was unsure
of my vocabulary, in
particular which
verb would
be the most appropriate

so desperately reluctant
to get things perchance,
breaking every
protocol, twisting
customary practice,
getting things
irredeemably wrong

especially given
our fraught and brittle
exchanges
over the years

where so hard
to judge whether
things
between us
cold as Arctic ice
on boiling
like the magma
in massive Vesuvius

and so
I left it to you who or
what
best in this context
to invoke

whilst I felt caught between
the wish that
in all aspects
you might “glow”, or
there again “sparkle”

beauty of rich sunset
versus diamond string
of stars

unless
best do both

or best, neither

as the days shorten
and never
grows real

I will invoke the gods and
the Universe itself

to ask, as last best gift,
some light might find you.