Tag Archives: poem

RWGIME CHANGE

REGIME CHANGE

we are meeting for coffee
fifty years to the day
we last
saw, spoke
to each other

could be real could
be just a dream

reality getting so porous
you could easily just
stick out
your hand
test the fabric

odds and probabilities
suggest five times in nine
you could
stick
your finger
straight through

the veil fading, evaporating
and something no less
ephemeral now
about the realm
of truth

all of which we do not discuss
hard after all those years
to find common
ground, something
worth sharing we
know
will be appreciated

meanwhile flashing in neon
writing on the wall
portents eveywhere
suddenly it
is all
a troubling semiotics
of apocalypse

heads blown off my
bombs, pulverized by
missiles

innocents vaporized
at primary school

signs and codes of
death and
second
coming, dynasties
of temple

perhaps (thinking aloud)
the world needs regime
change
for our very survival we
need every single regime changed

I feel, though you
shrug, the betrayed presence
of a half smile.

WORST THING ABOUT CHESS

WORST THING ABOUT CHESS

the worst, very worst
thing about chess
is the way the pieces
snigger at
non-Kasperov moves

their utter exasperation
when I blunder
revulsion when
I lose my queen

but still I battle
read the odd book
watch a few
You Tube videos

but
the game

I neither have
it by
intellect
or own it
by pure instinct

that dream
level
tactical
acumen

that sense of what
can be made to be

AWE

AWE
“once in a lifetime”
Eminem

a wisp of a man
almost helped me drown
always
putting
me down

when I arrived
back from
the dead unfortunately
back from near tragedy
not a word passed

but then a look
that spelled
it out
told me everything

and that is the pain
that rendered me tongue-
tied, immobile, useless
so very
very incomplete

failing you
at every turn

what a poor comparison
it makes, these sheaves of
dead-end poems,
set against
the harvest
of your life

real, meaningful achievements
leaving me in awe

AGAIN

AGAIN

need to speak
but cannot
find the words
seems to me
I have
none to utter

conclude
they must be, cannot
but be, hanging
out
on the line
washed, rinsed
spun alnost dry

needed them
to explain
how it is
I cannot love, do
not live,
am seriously unable
to stave off this pain

and now you tell
it is
   all repetition, forever
recycled,
as
   bad as it gets,
good as it is ever
going
    to be

a project of balance,
even symmetry
         (hardest, most
unforving type
monstrous
in its need to be)

DARKO

DARKO

don’t Darko me Donny
scare the life out of me
with a ghoulish apparition
from another timeline

give me a guided tour of my death
via clip of found footage

no lullaby me with
a poignant, quite haunting,
lovely temporal loop tale
where I discover
those crazy intersections
that show
my parents and siblings,
the whole gang
are all me

I am thing spread across
at least generations, possibly
generations, aeons,

already
     far into the future
I have visited every star

maybe, as you spell
all this out for me, demanding
I do sacrifice myself
to restore
cosmic integrity

it soon becomes apparent
that I have succumbed
through
    sheer paradox

or, harder still
to absorb,
it will
    bright as day dawn on me
I do not exist, never
existed at all

FROZEN

FROZEN

I am a
plastic action figure

to hazard a guess
you who position me
might call
me Napoleonic

here we
are now crossing a river

the bridge I am on now
may not be still standing
when we return

but
    led with acuity
there is no possibility
that it
all
go wrong

that here in our ranks
supremely confident of glory
we might
     be rebuffed, die
in the snow
become some
carnival of death
broken and shattered,
for all
who might follow
a most cautionay tale

but here we are
marching, one massive
armee together, when
the dice
they get thrown

will all
spring into battle
do our
soldierly duty

loyal
to a fault
to flag
and Emperor

ready
to give our
little lives
in combat

freeze in the snow, starve,
or die
otherwise
unnecessarily

slowly, quickly,
in manner most horrible

returned to
that big plastic or
cardboard box
where plastic soldiers go

without thought, without
afterthought,

without thought at all, feelings
or memory, waiting to
be called, frozen in
stance
soldiers
to the end

TREE

TREE

I instituted a tree
(delegated the actual
planting to
a gardener certain
to impress you,
impress
   itself upon you)

attended to its
growth studiously

observed it sink roots
watched it soar bit
by bit
branches
scraping the sky

no
riddle here

I am sure you
know or at least
dare guess why

twisting, turning,
spiralling like a gene gyre strand
stuff
    to be read
off all its leaves

seed that I started, sowed,
out of control

A GENTLER TIME

A GENTLER TIME

a gentler time
when tectonic plates
scoffed at and shunned
the very idea
Earth’s hot core
was still ripe with satire,
high science comedy

this, long before,
no floating feeling
downtown Pompeii
benign
   shadow of Vesuvius

who could guess it
mountain volcano
tell the difference, spell
out the betwixt
and between

everything
gentle peaceful at
the gladiator school
in the working class quarters
from high to
low,
paterician and slave
in this quiet day
amongst days
(one more
to chalk up to
glorious Empire)

we dug them up
preserved as
spaces
    shapes
holes in the ash

snapshot of how
they lived, selfie of
how they died

killer punchline:
the truth
of that comedy
not to be denied