Tag Archives: poem

WHY ON EARTH?

WHY ON EARTH? 

poetry is
the soul of man
the breath of life’s being

and those that write
our unacknowledged
legislators
    just happen to be

so far, so good,
but now lets just settle for
a change in tone, of pace

ask
   why, Oh why
are you still writing?

and why on Earth
did you start in the first place?

BRIDGE

BRIDGE

they found a tunnel under
the Garden of Eden

a German archeologist
excavated it

seems some contraband may
have found its way through
a labyrinthine network
to places where its
presence
could not have been
more destructive

to the great mythology of
what went down here
who
was to blame
and what it means

adding to the neverending theology
and spiritual analysis

for which resolution we actually also
need the bridge

a bridge has yet to
found in the garden of Eden

we can only begin to imagine
how finding one will
structurally change things

TEETH

TEETH

savages
cowards
animals

whirring blades blend
and then, Oh
my God; what a smoothie!

blades that whir at high speed
good for mowing, great
for a disposal unit

metaphors becoming
so displaced
cannot keep
up
with historical events

and how indeed
shall this history
be written

by tattered text of the crushed
lately bone
and ash

the lightning writing on the wall
of truth all so suddenly
lying through its teeth

LOCK

LOCK

love is that
gleaming apple
too high

up
the tree

it is
the death bed of the intellectual
fatal aporia
kills
their categories

it is the puzzle
with too many pieces
for the box
infinite choice

the blurb on
the sleeve

pity barely any fit together let alone

interlock

and you told yourself
it would be all too easy

are we not
so perfectly designed for this?

DISAPPEAR

DISAPPEAR

good
better
best

suddenly superlatives
don’t carry
the weight
they used to

I wonder how I,
if I happened to be an
advanced, super-intelligent species
would infiltrate
(have infiltrated)
this sea, water planet
in order to control it

in order to relegate the existing
top dogs
keep then constrained
and monitored
so smartly and with
such sophistication
they do not know
that I am here

running the show, keeping them
so much
none the wiser

good better best
happy happier a whole long list springs to mind

of words to help disappear

THAT WE DO NOT HEAR

THAT WE DO NOT HEAR

we do not hear
the laughter off the gods any more

at our lovable quirks or
(too often) outright
stupidity

or as they jostle for supremacy
in their own hierarchies

at their own foibles and excesses
as we know
from Ovid and
Homer

these almost exclusively
of an amorous nature
as when
Aphrodite and Ares became
trapped and entangled
in a net woven by
Hephaestus, sinned against,
aggrieved cuckolded party,

so engrossed in each other
(and who dare blame them?)
that when the rest of
Olympus rushed
to take in this spectacle
they flatly continued,
as the gods
roared with
rough mirth and yet
were riveted with wonder
at such
a free, fabulous show

where the parties could not have
more consummately represented
their
respective sexualities and
gender polarities

if on this question of
beauty as we riff you

grab my gist and run with it wickedly

in your own imagination

of humans
laughing at gods there is
of this species
no practice, no
hope of
continuation
the mocking spirit of great Aristophanes
squashed at its first sign
dead
in its tracks

killed by those who
believe the gods, all gods
are beyond
any comedy, reflecting
their faith (ludicrous
beyond measure) that

they are
as gods themselves, our history

blighted by the rise of such
self-proclaimed deities, wondrously
inept
holy imperators
whose narcissism no
catalogue
of statues commissioned so that
the love of
the people can be felt
beyond death
continue as legacy through
all of posterity

Oh think, my friends, what the genius
of an Aristophanes, embodiment
of true
human comedy

could play before the stars, which
share our liberation, our
moment of ecstasy

and like all our
false structures are left
helpless to the humour

who knows! teetering
on the edge
veering this
way and that on the brink of collapse

HUGO

HUGO

He wore his
Hugo award around his neck
to show to the world
(all worlds, possible
worlds)
his profound imagination

so much cross-pollination
in this stupendous endeavour

it is perhaps best to imagine
an entire new biosphere
suddenly sprung into existence
genres feeding genres
begetting subgenres

Frankenstein children of a
barrier crossing, boundary
breaking father
at the heart of which that
forever philosophical
distinction
between self and text, self and
world, text
and world, which
might not even
be distinctions at all

and there he is
to be found, by nature, if
not always

hand in hand
with some gorgeous alien
or spectacularly equipped
android woman

or chatting away in the low oxygen
toxic atmosphere cloud space
of some seedy
Los Angeles bar
talking to Philip K Dick clones
and replicant versions
of Bukowski
the poet

each with unsettling flash-backs
and incomplete memory
luckily, in the not yet
wholesome availability of
science fiction style
psychotropics
and psychotics

enough raw rough and ready
brain-killing grain alcohol
to go
(sweet irony of the adverb) splendidly
around.

GREEN

GREEN

the rains

       the rain
       the rain
        the rain

have given
the grass, the trees,
the plants

a lush edge

the green fingers of
the gods responsible
for green

        have grown
greenier

and me
                      on the margins

liminal
as usual

       feeling both oddly alien
and strangely at home