Tag Archives: poem

MR GLADWELL

MR GLADWELL

Oh Mr Gladwell
I am playing chess
writing poetry

writing poetry
playing chess

playing
             poetry

writing      chess

my brain has become
a RORSCHACH blot

there
     is blood all over
the board

strange body fluids
all over the page

wanted to be a kind of genius
but I’m dissolving into
nothingness

         Mozart composing symphonies
still at the breast,

                 working out
the arias for his operas

from within
     his pauper’s grave.

B ALL (and end all)

B ALL (and end all)

what’s the monolith?

and what’s a monolith
doing here in our
                          simple
B movie?

did you, my extraordinarily
intelligent darling
            bring it onto
the set
     write it into the script even?

seeing eye to
                      digital eye
communing secretly, talking
                                  telepathically
in binary code, arcane
subtext, hidden
                 hieroglyphics?

stretching yourself to the  limit
to receive the advances
of super-
             advanced alien

higher consciousness
to higher consciousness

                          (raw) red eye
to (raw) red eye

parallel line
                   to parallel line

biomechanical to organic
in endless feedback loop

ALONG

UK OK (not so very)

        still solid
    (courtesy of Victorian
architecture)

crazy high aquaducts
    (now exactly what
               do they do?)

university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
    returned from
south africa

settler colonial
(apartheid to
           god knows who else
and me
and you)

but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?

how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
     force-fed gloom

red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
     most exploitative

see your politicians now
scared at the thought
                               people

might
     have their
                       own ideas

university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
                 taught me something
about the
    economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
                    the previous tenants)

anarchy
OK OK    strawberries
spoiled, by
                      this time
was
          the late 70s

ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
                                  and I’ll
imagine
            in falsetto

less than happily singing along
        

SQUARES

SQUARES

dark squares
light squares

he is a classy player:
knows the precise order
of the relationship between them

also is expert with clocks
has clearly established
in the minds of
all and sundry

that come Hell or
high water in a particular game

losing on time
is outright impossibility

Oh that imperial palace
of a poem

    there we see chess in
all its class oppositions
and anxieties

the bishops scrambling down
diagonals like
Hurricane pilots intercepting
the Luftwaffe fighting
to get altitude

in the sky it is so much
nobler

      easier to succumb
to the mythology of the machine

STICK

STICK

stick to football Gary
and

over and above that
stick to your job
        (not down
the left
wing but
        finisher in
the middle) 

stop
    sticking it to
all those true
Britons, guardians
of the long
ball game

who never won
a sweaty sock or
dinged
    shin pad

no thought
of golden boots and
golden goals

won
against Beckenbauer’s
band, Maradona’s
mob
    serious rivals, experts
in dishing out
national
    humiliation

nor
are they ever
likely to, spending their
careers on the pitch
like demented ducks
lacking
    all
        sense of the game, worse
than headless
chickens

scoring goal after goal
after crazy own goal

from
every outrageous angle
and somehow
always what
is contrived to be

a totally illogical
offside position

AT APPOMATTOX COURTHOUSE

AT APPOMATTOX COURTHOUSE

proceedings were held up
because the burgers and cokes
had not arrived

then they
        stopped shirts, swopped swords

slavery remained the elephant in the room

it was either kiss and makeup
or unconditional surrender

Arnold Schwartzenegger was playing General Grant
the Rock (naturally)
was playing the ghost of Stonewall Jackson
Charlie Sheen
was totally miscast as Robert E Lee

he rolled ten singles in succession
and so Vicksburg fell
and Pickett’s charge was defeated

unfortunately this doesn’t mean shit
because the Japs and the Krauts
invaded on alternate history Netflix

they promised to
have a comnerative reunion meeting
when the time felt right

slavery remained the elephant in the room

(a room
      nobody bothered to, didn’t
even think to clean)