poem – Page 210 – poems 2 die for

ON MY PART

ON MY PART

was going to send you
an audio

making love to you
with voice

reaching those spots
other voices fail to reach

but
I held back, pressed
record

but no speech
on my part
nothing came out

think it must
be the terrible fear
that something
spoken
sensuously
will
bounce back

and before I know it
there I am once more
falling for
you again

desperate that all the pleasure
I talk, is pleasure
that in my
heart I still
hope of talking you into

lying back on my bed night
after night alone
longing, dreaming

one day
we will touch

AJAR

AJAR

listening to progressive jazz (Ian Carr’s Nucleus
with Chris Spedding
on guitar)

same time ploughing through Joyce’s Ulysses
say ploughing but sometimes
one is surfing there
on a glorious wave, following the sweeping tide

nothing I can think of
could exceed this configuration
in respect of
artistic complexity, cerebral
integrity

unless
twin philosophers of the body politic
were
(becoming Maenad, going full Dionysian)
to pop in
for a spot of ménage a trois

or
no less exquisite
the
jam session
to end all jazz
jam sessions

in case
they coming left the door ajar

BYE

climate change
has not touched me yet

maybe
warming is not real, neither
have I been seared
nor likewise broiled

the talk of the Poles South
and North shedding
their huge
ice
falling apart
does not seem
real to me now

as I lie here
contemating the eternal
verity that we as species
will continue
forever as we are

the dread of our demise
just brush by

ZITHER

zither was what I used to strum
and trombone too
could crank a
tune out of

but all got exchanged
traded for bone bagpipe
at the local
flea market

and yes, feel I got cheated
I definitely do

bought and sold way
below
true value like
a cracked Grecian urn

down to thing of singld string
which I can pluck for all I’m worth

but no way its going
to replace Paganini
or be up there
with Hendrix

poets and guitar heroes
       naturally enough seem
to
    incline towards
    early graves

AS FAR AS

as far

as poetry is concerned

I am

provisional front

out

in left field

since poetry owes me

has not been

so sweet

to me

demanding

I constantly exceed myself

never too

understanding

or overly kind

this poem too

gung-ho

about

its sympathy

and charity

and desire to

enshrine this

in the hearts

of all of humankind

this poem too, no exception,

giving me

a big fun for my money

obstinate in making it case,

protesting its faith

whole world of difference however,

between what it seems to be saying

and how it appears to me

DONE

I am done with dissonance
except where
it captures the complexion
of what surrounds
gives
taste of the chaos that
riddles through

harmony is the thing that
must nourish, bring together
                        harmony that
feels
      like
             impossible belief

when last, if ever, were
woken by wings
hovering above
taking angelic form?

just add a few Pratt and Whitneys
and there you have dissonance

what you figured might be
Michael, Uriel, Gabriel
                drowning out the room
with clamour of regular comic
superhero
        (or, indeed villain)
elevated to cosmic, epic,
mythical proportions
        by virtue of three-
act structure, and titanic movie screen

already you can see it touch it
smell it feel it, let alone
hear it

this dissonance, every tiny
breath of harmony
here in me, here
in the poem

so desperate to distance from
quietly eschew.

Professor Wade responds to my new collection

BOOKWORM

BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)

a mysterious book
appears

what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
bookcase
is,
uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)

my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
from this tree

though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
against the blasphemy
of writing
reading

but
who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?

I write down my dream
but then read further, find,
it was
already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
by the conflicting
gravitational pull
of dramatically dissonant worlds

I burn
all I have written
the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
having failed the inquisition

we are
all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain

stuck
in
either hemisphere

doomed
to tell our tale

leaves pages
things metaphoric,
synonymous

left
all over the place

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND
“Oh, Mr Bond!” Raul Silva
“Skyfall”

the rogues
want to prorogue

they want to
go Klingon
they want to buccaneer
they are the
best worst pirates
you had
rather you
had never heard
of

when ferocious alpha aliens
arrive to conquer in
(of all things) their mothership

they will be desperate to
host, put on
a show,
suicidal in
their need to bond

play footsie-
tentacle
under the table

with these creatures
human, or alien,
nothing ever
on the level

nothing
above board

Sent from my iPhone

ONE DAY ON MARS

ONE DAY ON MARS

Mars bars
Mars bars

the man has been
eating far too
many
Mars bars

his brain
is reaching
escape
velocity

reading too
much Martian poetry

I blame you
Mr Wells, blame
you Mr Raine
blame you Schiaparelli

dug
all those
canals
in is brain

and above all,
I blame you Mr Bradbury
filling his head
with Martian mushrooms,
telepathic Martians
losing a war
of colonial conquest

most basic parallel
with Earth history
a writer
strolling across
a desert
plain
munching
on a Mars bar
(overhead the irregular
shaped
Phobos and Deimos)
might feel compelled to make

Sent from my iPhone