Tag Archives: poem

TWINKLE

TWINKLE

twinkle, twinkle
little Persian cat

how I wonder how
you catch

so many of
these bats
as they
flash by

target locked on
in your
green eye

stripped
of suppression
stealth, and
other mega-
tech wiles
dead duck for the taking
when all
this ballyhoo
dies

or flies
home on prayer,
tea tray clumsy as,
battered
and mauled

supposedly invisible,
we are told invincible,
layer
upon layer of
vaunted superiority

little
Persian cat
had
on toast served

deep fried

RIDDLE

RIDDLE

drop me from
from nearly thirty thousand
feet

or maybe
more aptly
two thousand and one
plus which
in Arabic numerals
at least will
tally up
to two thousand
and three

the sneakiness of three
plunging us
headlong
via Oedipus, foot leg and
stick of the Sphinx
into the heart
of riddle

whose subject
              framed by that odd
counterfactual
joke
   of time

we now seen
born
    held up to the Sun
but dreaming
of Moon
    strangely named Moons

Phobos, Deimos (Oh, I
mean
Demos
Titan, Europa, Miranda,
plus others
as well

five listed here for
every toe on
your foot, finger
on your hand

held up to the Sun, ball
of such Uranian energy

watch him
      long for that furnace

given
the slightest opportunity
doomed to there
walk, hobble,
crawl

MISUNDERSTANDING

MISUNDERSTANDING

Yes, we did
have our intimate moment

but now
in the afterglow

we seem
to be labouring
under a
misunderstanding

talking to each other
as if every word
macine transcribed
into Enigma code

acting under
the erroneous assumption
that we
are somehow created
as divine reflection

and not
some extension of plankton
whose million
year evolution took
a pretty
    ludicrous turn.

FRIDGE SYLLOGISM

FRIDGE SYLLOGISM

my cats, great philosophers
that they are
assure me
that inside my
old fridge

it is
pure utopia

a Platonic communist state
jam packed with delicacies
for all
     felines
to share

each according to their need, and
power to irrutate

and I, for my Sins (all of
which pretty mortal), have
five of
     them, one Socratic,
another Nietzschean and the
rest undecided whether
to follow Slavoj
Zizek or
call themselves Arisotelian

masters (and mistresses) of
the art of the syllogism
each of these
little logicians
           expert at reasoning

and so would you be too
if you believed for a moment,
as cats indeed do,
that we
       are blessed with
a modicum of rationality
if not an entirely rational species

whose yes/no, valid/invalid, true/false binary processes
can be read off their faces

and exploited to
        ensure the

keys to
     that aforementioned
paradise are not
left entirely in human hands
   

AND FIRE

AND FIRE

Suddenly the sky faded, went
watercolours

turned blueberry ripple
as
   at that end of the spectrum
they flowed into each other
all those short
wavelength colours
in all their pastel shades

or maybe not suddenly, maybe
I might have been
distracted and missed
the entire
    sequence

the transformation as
it progressed step
by tiny step

and so
     mystified by the allure
of all these blue -mauves
I let my fancy,
                   for a moment,
run away with me

taking
    a serious bet with
higher powers

that Angels on bicycles
would shortly appear

miraculously pedalling
through the lilac clouds

not to
    be likened to, or mistaken for
military drones

loaded to capacity
with all that they need
to turn
   everything moving
to smoke and fire



SORRY FOR

SORRY FOR

Sorry for pulling you
out of the world of your smartphone
if only for a moment
to scroll
through these lines here

reading this thing
history will decide
is not
even a poem

presuming that
there will be history
and that world
outside your phone
but now
contained immediately
inside it

goes full Dr Stangelove
full we’ll meet again
total exchange nuclear

messing with
the service courtesy
end of the atmosphere.