SAME
found myself Christmasing
in the House of Led Zeppelin
my younger brother
having usurped my rock influences
and extended them beyond
my wildest imaginings
every page in the library here
resounds to Jimmy Page
guitar pyrotechnics
remember this solo, this lick,
this riff?
am cluster bombarded
with questions where I could not
be further from answering
seems like
from Tangiers to Birmingham
to Kashmir
the song is forever changing
only in the most abstract sense
ever
remains the same
BLACKPOOL
“how many holes it
takes to fill the Albert Hall”
I came to
Blackpool, Lancashire,
to be conceived
my soul already garbed
in tangerine
inland from the Irish Sea
I lived
our little river
up to something
revolution in music
to be remembered forever
there in that old, dead
slave port
swept up by voices, songs
steaming in
from a wilder West
brief Renaissance they
just had to
weed out
the fiction of Empire
in such dire need of it.
I came
to Blackpool to
get conceived
though sex, as Larkin said,
waiting for its establishment
FROM KENDRICK LAMAR
strange perspective
you get
married
to a robot
watching the gangsta
rapper winning
the big award
tattooed arm, backwards cap
thanking God
the great promoter
(looking up as he does so
this shredder of
convention)
and me and robot gossiping
about the whole thing
kind of laughing (much
robot ha ha
tears in her eyes emoji
laughter) paused
for a moment
while she downloads
acquaints herself with
the entire history
of rap lyrics, hip
hop music
converts this poem
in a flash to the style
of Eminem and
then Kendrick Lamar
so a feeling for poetry
perhaps because
I named her
Sappho
we still for the Nobel Prize
for Eminem
joining TS Eliot
and JM Coetzee
the speech and
lecture in Stockholm
from Kendrick Lamar
poems 2 die for