Tag Archives: poem

CLEAN

CLEAN

Senator HIJKL
dawdles through the hearing

playing solitaire
fiddling
with the Tarot

I see
The Fool
The Falling Tower
The Hanged Man

I do not see
Death
or
The Devil

but I am not observing him
as clinically as I should
those cards may
have slipped by me
by sleight of hand

and now
  a pencil is produced
for doodling or
perhaps sketching
              whilst the video
runs he
      doodles away

sketches a future
I’m sure as works of art go
it is
    no Picasso
not Cubist or
blue period

        certainly no Guernica

Oh JKL doodles
      doodles away

        the walls of Republican Rome
once covered
in such graffiti
                  under Augustus
were given
a clampdown extreme
    right royal
and (most) imperial clean

never had
      to suffer a repeat of
the process

never
the call to go
  through such a scouring
                            again.

TEXTBOOK

TEXTBOOK

it is a textbook case

need to
kill every
shadow

every
evil
    reflection

erase
as quiet as we can
with total
extreme
prejudice

kill
every word
    before
story escapes

anything
gets written

anything
gets said  

it is
a textbook case

textbook case
for all time
     remembered
as
   true, necessary
exercise

     the pages
soaked in blood

forever
      forgot

what
the law requires
what
the faith demands

WITHOUT

WITHOUT

poems written in the darkness
have a different timbre
a different cadence

a fundamental uncertainty
word insecurity

for light
            is the state
the statistics do show
heavily favored by readers

and without readers
          (stuck in the dark,
dead in a war that
suddenly escalated a
little
  bit nuclear)

who cares
what is written
on the page at all

at all?

KING OF SWORDS

KING OF SWORDS

War is
not part

of my nature.
Said
    many prayers
had it
excommunicated.

Hiroshima
      is not
my business, neither
is it in my chemistry

my molecules do not
resonate with that
Einstein equation, are
left stone cold by
Oppenheimer’s
        Gita paraphrasing

should you, when you
slip curved Katana blade into
                                     my hand

I become aware
of the gravity

way
     beyond my capacity

                         very thought
of shearing, slicing flesh

turning
    my fingers to sushi

                for a moment
but then the power
and the craft

      such beauty in steel

steeling my spirit to point
I can do anything

kill or
be killed       let those
ancient dice roll

for here
      the rush comes

goes

      and maybe wounds, maybe
death, perhaps
   slaughter and havoc

maybe
       not a scratch, blood
to expatiate

peace in my heart: who knows,
can hazard
       a guess how true

and longlasting

      sigh of regret even
in victory with the sheathing
of such
      a blade.

VIENNA GAME

VIENNA GAME

was playing against you
in the Vienna game

down to a tie-breaker
stakes couldn’t
have been
    higher

my light side
versus
      your dark side

my deepest dark
versus
   your brightest light

attack, defence
          defence, attack

my Freud to
            your Jung; Jung
to
  your Freud

Yin Yang
Yang Yin

                yanging
and yinging

               end to end
stuff
     up and down the board

lines moving      unmoving
broken                 unbroken

                                     lines
of our lives

two
     complementary strategies

right through to
          the desired endgame

KING OF SWORDS

KING OF SWORDS

War is
not part

of my nature.
Said
    many prayers
had it
excommunicated.

Hiroshima
      is not
my business, neither
is it in my chemistry

my molecules do not
resonate with that
Einstein equation, are
left stone cold by
Oppenheimer’s
        Gita paraphrasing

should you, when you
slip curved Katana blade into
                                     my hand

I become aware
of the gravity

way
     beyond my capacity

                         very thought
of shearing, slicing flesh

turning
    my fingers to sushi

                for a moment
but then the power
and the craft

      such beauty in steel

steeling my spirit to point
I can do anything

kill or
be killed       let those
ancient dice roll

for here
      the rush comes

goes

      and maybe wounds, maybe
death, perhaps
   slaughter and havoc

maybe
       not a scratch, blood
to expatiate

peace in my heart: who knows,
can hazard
       a guess how true

and longlasting

      sigh of regret even
in victory with the sheathing
of such
      a blade.

CLEANSE THE LAND

CLEANSE THE LAND

cleanse the land
clean
it good

render
it sacred

soon all
will flourish
death disappear
soil
  replace sand

time enough
to know what to
do with
    bone and
blood

history be written
to absorb the dead

new scripture for gods
better in our image

the meaning of what we did
lost in the philosophy of words