Tag Archives: poem

SPECIES

SPECIES

time travel back
to ancient Athens
they made Socrates
drink hemlock
on the grounds
of corruption
lucky for us

the charge did not stick
we saw
through thst
slander, laughed
at that spin

not that we have
the capacity to do that today
when we revere our leaders
for the lies
that they tell us
buy into the fake narratives
as our matter of
life our death

refuse to believe anything
that is not illogical
and ittational
    as testament to the devotion
with which
  we contrive our decline

time travel back to Ancient Athens
like an alien planet now
so distant in
       space and time

HEART

HEART

at your heart
you are paper
by which we
mean
  worst kind of paper

by which we mean
paper as fictional relic
of its digital self

at it’s heart
you thought solid
core like
the Earth’s perhaps even
rare heavy metals

but
    there is nothing there
but vacuum but void
but
    infinite implosion
    so sorry to disappoint

but at core, in your
                         heart

you are
     nothingness itself

not, to be sure, a silent
or quietly withdrawn nothingness
but one strident and violent:
essence
      of bombast itself

stripped of logic and reason
immune to
             fact, innoculated
against theory

will be
        prove with a logic no
less than
catastrophic

      to bring an end to
near a
     planetful of us

so much at stake in every
denial of distress




BARBARIAN

BARBARIAN
  
self
and other

guy in tweed
explaining the magistrate’s
dilemmas of
Lacanian proportions

in that book
by that other guy, who
taught me
   I believe, if
I remember correctly

(so much forgotten about
that younger figure
             so much baggage
had to discard
stuff
     ingrown I had
to excise)

and here I am
trying to come up with
a smart arse question
that
   I hope will
stump the lot of them
their on the
limits of institutional discourse
challenging those linuts
even as
I appear to treat
them with regard

inside outside
         wasn’t always so
clung to orthodoxy for
security when
could barely
string two words together

self and
    other

no AK or RPG but
instinctively feel
am
   now barbarian

shadow made real
apotheosis of
         what once feared

am indeed I believe
     far less question than
a kind
   of solution

ANIMAL

ANIMAL

call me animal
I will be

stuff
of nightmare

the worst animal
you could possibly imagine
and then some

can tear the gates of civilization
one-shot
off its hinges

with
my bare hands, if
you can call them hands

tell me I’m a monster
and before you even
looked up front your notes
on the lectern

a thing will be approaching
as fast as a mamba
here
to help you redefine
your monstrous terminology

add something, that little
je ne sais quoi
to
that utter vicious ugliness

which
you cannot (dare
not ) see but

whose holy truth is
your mirror reflection

ROPES

ROPES

Ah,
what do we
have here

more and more
look at me postings

every moment
in the spectacle of life

you could put
them all together
you would have an album
you would have
a history

something definitive
but,
     call me
old goat
    call me spoilsport
                   misanthrope

but as darkness
gathers and
        they do tighten the
ropes

I fear what I saw
as no change
is every
          kind of  change

same smiling look at me
posture
         look at my face

thought there
            no change

      but seems
the frame, it
                  has darkened
and they have tightened the ropes

TANTAMOUNT

TANTAMOUNT

I stumble
into the temple
past
the guards
and moneylenders
who appear
not to notice

my, how fruitful and prosperous
— a billion, trillion times fold

since
the time of Jesus

and there
in the inner sanctum
I behold a trinity
Pennywise, Baron
Harkonnen
and the hydra-
headed great
of Merkava

brooding on something
hatching their joint scheme

lucky, in fact,
our blessed fortune,
that all this
amounts to
all this
be tantamount to
is a
meaningless dream.