love – Page 2 – poems 2 die for

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

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.

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

INFINITESIMAL

my desire
for you so binary system massive

so why
didn’t space time bend
everything bend
to my will
and with it,
you?

everything stop
in its tracks slow down
to extremity?

must be
what you felt for me, tiny
a void, antithetical, infinitesimal

as quantum
probability
worst case scenario

thing massive in its negativity
whole universe size
singularity

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