Tag Archives: philosophy

MUG AND BEING

MUG AND BEING

five types
of bread

seven kinds
of beans

a bean smorgasboard on
a tiny toast

tell me Juliet
you are the expert
on the names
of things

could this bland name
cover
    such a
stupendous thing?

or are we now forced
to jack up
our language
    as common parlance
turns
cordon bleau, basic
foodstuffs
forget
   their station in life
invert such an
ancestry to
plead
  their case for
being haut cuisine?

once upon
a time
   coffee was
just coffee

being
before essence
bean before
steam

and so much de Beauvoir
Sartre cafe existentialism
beat
    poetry: Corso, Ferlinghetti
hinged upon it

but now
     you need a handbook of
coffee phrase
and idiom, a coffee lexicon,
a coffee thesaurus

not just
spolit for choice but
thrown into
infinite quandary

whilst
business is buzzing
deals are
going down

brains going whole full
minutes without
delectable roast
flavour
   indispensible caffeine
(unless caffeine
free because
   trendy to be so  special
stylish or
in caffeine
cold turkey)

to drink to take to eat
to go
  
  dolce dolce rapido
latte expresso

sweetie
   dear

would you like a house cup
cup of
   house brand with

sublime piece oc toast
(actual piece of art)
and
   the being of your beans?

Need your answer now
before
     beford you very eyes

I percolate
      become      pure dream

FREEZE-DRIED

fudge soft
     was my brain at my
first philosophy class

Plato’s dialectic wholesome,
why should not the State be
good and strong
and solid and true?
why should I not be
thinking axiomatically
working my
way slowly
     towards great gnosis
at the cave’s entrance

why should this not all be,
even in a philosophy class,
some desert of
the real shadow show
programmed to
amuse
   this unspecified
superior intelligence?

But these are questions for
later
     not for poor white boy
at mountainside university
refugee from
all that Christian National
Education might teach
true
   to apartheid

and so, face-beaming, I
did drink it, savour
swallow
   every joyous scrap of
the fat one via
Professor Obi Wan’s
interpretation

the Jewish boy in the corner
(so slightly older
reading his way into
territory
     full-on genealogical, beyond
good and evii

scowling at my
naivete,

     having not
become my friend

Nietzsche not yet
my philosopher of choice

outside, of course, outside
the theatre down
the slopes
beyond the steps

something stirring
something
        at a different pace,
with a different
dialectic

about to explode
about
   to rock to the core

but this
down the line

from up in this high place
easy to calculate
work with
   established truths,
historical certainties, clear
percentages

down there
as bra Chris wrote

its all
in graffiti, still
yet in code

soon
   world going to
go full on punk, class-war
deconstructive

defeat in Vietnam

meaning
power
      of powers

determined to determine
we think how they say,
are
   so subtly, subtly
forced
to do as we are told

mind put on hold
fast-food fried down
to the last algorithm

brain
    freeze-dried, feel
free to liquify

fudge soft
back then

     but maybe
Plato was right

CLOUDLESS

CLOUDLESS

a cloudless sky
stopped my scarlet red
Citroen
  to open the farm gate

cannot pretend to
understand the physics of
colour or
   indeed, the physics
of sky
you lost me as soon
as you spoke of wave-lengths
and light diffusion

but here we are (or at least, here
I am, your presence with me
somewhere
  between metaphor and
simple rhetorical gesture)

here we are
as if shielded from
the Universe (which is
the case exactly) virtue of
us being
    (no clouds
to distract me) right
at the epicentre of
a surrounding sphere, looking
out from
inside the skin, the translucent
skin
   of a beautiful blue ball

expanded to a size, a height,
that just works for us perfectly

reminding me
        as this time of ultra
advanced return
of feudalism
              of the music
of the spheres

with all that economy
with all that cosmology

nothing in a million years here close to
      that darkest conclusion

that things beyond this
blue bubble

moving away from us so fast
they are
beyond
all
   Doppler red-
shift
     beyond very
                  speed of light

and
so

back down
       to Earth as always
for
sheer preservation
of sanity, not

        let all this here
overwhelm me

wanting
those clouds back

wanting not to imagine myself
inside the skin
of anything

wanting
to just go
       where it is all heading
commit
to that glow

   light speed beyond
but (blessing of
relatvity) with it

one
    feels

                just
floating

moving in one’s mind
from
      incarnation to
incarnation

no desire
     to be laboured by

understand
the physics at all

QUIETLY (SAID THE PHILOSOPHER)

QUIETLY (SAID THE PHILOSOPHER)

quietly, said the
philosopher,

thus
the philosopher spake

argued quietly
should be
my default mode

here
on the edge
of an abyss

never jump to, rush to,
solution, conclusion

only after
careful inference,
                   deduction
make
   lightning leap

remember
   that a single feather
a flock doth not
of
  necessity make
still less
     an angel

though the brush of a wing
where none
      should logically be

the feel of
a beyond
          you cannot put your
finger on

may be
    different thing
                    entirely
every
   ounce of your being
shred
    and philosophical fibre

crying out for
     deeper engagement

doing so
      quietly

FLOOR MANAGER

FLOOR MANAGER

was asked
what is the
difference
between a poem
and a
soup can?

poem
and a soap box
poem and
a Rorschach blot

or should that
be blotch

seems like fractals abound
in all those tiny
peninsulas and
rough, rough edges

like constructing a flat
two dimensional map
or writing
          a poem
on the floor
of my brain

SUDDENLY SLAVOJ

SUDDENLY SLAVOJ

let us
delineate

four square address
the issue of morpholog

no prefix suffix
juicy bits
sexual punning innuendo
flyby Uranus
double-.entendre allowed

unless, somehow,
by some miracle,
the crude oil of
laughter might
heal

solder the spirit along
its split seam

  this I believe
the crude position of
Aristophanes as
        adumbrated to the dinner
guests the evening
of the symposium

before he got so alcoholic rhapsodic
did an Icarus
       just fell down

gross guffaws of great philosopy
                  (looking at
you Professor Zizek)

helping us
    spin with the world
as it goes round and round