Tag Archives: poem

CONFLATION

CONFLATION

so much conflation
in this V For Vendetta parliament

it could well
lift off, fly away
like the Hindenburg
or the Montgolfier balloon

fly away
    to a sunlit upland
nativist Britain

one science-fiction secured
against any alien threat

for how will these tentacled
monsters in their
mother ships coming
to genocide
    and colonize us

in their leaky sinking
dingy boat
        fleeing the anarchy
we created
wars we started

just like anyone would
     (but being British,  they
look hideous to us)

HOUSE RULES

HOUSE RULES

there is no
poetry
about
this house

no fibre
in this room
    to speak of

just so-so people
who
     when the word
was elevate

when the word
was transform

were absent from school
dreaming the dreams
that children
of Empire dream

of securing power
of the ever so nicely
polite and
compliant backs

of the suffering mass
of the British people

MOREOVER

MOREOVER

got shot
at point-blank range
but you say
I ran straight
into a bullet

a good bullet
        moreover

one that knows
the difference between
right and wrong

a silver bullet, a golden
bullet, a Willy Wonka
eternal
     gob-stopping bullet

made by the great
celestial munitions factory

over the rainbow
before that got
shot to shreds

HOW

HOW

how shall
all this remembered

find its way
into the the books

be retold
by the old folks

taught
in the clsssroom?

will this desperate spin
you are Hell-bent
on manifacturing

find its way from
your dizzy life-ignoring,
image-igonoring
brains onto
revered pages?

or will history be
your bitch
    as truth is now?

CHANCE

CHANCE

thank you for
sending me all
those weapons-
grade poems

in return I sent you
this end of days
story I am working on
entitled: The Day
the Earth Looked
a Bit Different

something does not
destroy the Earth, or
attack the planet
accidentally or
by intention

merely
     plays around a bit
with our perception

desperate to save our
home world by
heightening our sense
that we
     do not belong here
have little idea
what we are doing
and no real conviction
about who we
really are

undermining our current
compensatory drive for fixity and certainty

it is believed that this
unprovoked alien
interference and
attempted celestial
manipulation

may well be thing
to give us a fighting chance

MEASURE

MEASURE

measure that phrase
see what we might
distil from it

Oh the essence of that cadence
is elixir, to put it
plebian  plainly
is music
   to my ears

has a French know not what
syllabic ring to it

is pleasant of feel and
to the touch in exquisite extreme

would that I could write so:
be creature of delicate
supplement, careful balance

even as the world is shifting:
places where already breakneck
is even out-accelerating

and the page
the page

      things seismic there, the text
spiking, falling, big fear is
cannot but
       be flat-
lining somewhat shortly

as for the stage
       much staggering incomprehension in respect
of beneath the boards all
                    tectonic plates

strike at the need to measure
but by then, of course,
               too late   too late

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD MORE POSTMODERN)

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD
MORE POSTMODERN)

They put the poet on reality television.

I did not get
to see the programme;
analyse the working
out of that proposition.

what was done
in the shower.

Caught on CCTV
for all eternity.

But I think I can hazard
a guess
how it pans out
as poetic expression:

the poet
dies (of course)
as a figure
of tragic exclusion

and the poem, given
space and time,
gets over its grief

rides out into the sunset
with a sestina side-saddle

and everyone, cast
and crew,
all set to
live their lives not
stoically but
much happily ever after

figure
they might need
a script
one where some
budding your therapist
pays off
the mortgage
attending to each psyche
with radical
depression therapy.