poem – Page 211 – poems 2 die for

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

WAYSIDE

Not a doubt
my script is being written
by a severe Russian novelist

giving me really poor lines
a Dostoevsky life

this piece here
being pretty prime example

poem, if that’s what
you can call it
falling
quite by the wayside

and me
wandering through life
seemingly without an arc
let alone
driven by quest, on
pilgrimage

following
the flow (if flow it is) of
words
wherever they go,
wherever they take me

with what false promise,
fatal lure
ot gnosis, wisdom.
sublimation

revelation
that I am no one’s fool,
no one’s text,
no one’s flawed or
anti-
hero, character-whatever

puppet told
to prance
and then put back
in the box

ECLIPSE

got kissed
by an eclipse

full
on the lips

nothing sensual:
something industrial
about the sound
of those
suckers locking
or truly confrontational
like the clash
of contending blades

and you
in your headset
oblivious to my
life-and-death love battle

having zoned yourself out
of the untidy range
of all the ambient
swirling noise
and feedback

waiting for the light, the
total light taking
too long
about its dawning

waiting
for new
colours,
different darkness

still
same old old playing
play
rewind
play rewind
the

tunes of our time
tunes of our time

IN SUPPLY

I saw you wearing
the darkest, hugest
sunglasses imaginable

necessarily so, what else
might shield your blue blue eyes
from the Heavenly Sun in
full heavenly glare

light so bright
you would be forgiven
for imagining
that light
to be everywhere

and there you were
tucking not
into ambrosia
but a fat, juicy, meaty
(perhaps
the meatiest pie
imaginable)

knowing that
everything you had
ever dreamt
is
here realized

a paradise of demand
never short
of supply.

TINA

TINA

law of
thermodynamics

there is no
limitless energy
force of
Nature
voice blasting its
way into deep space
flash-fire
raging across
the stage

what can we say
sometimes it takes
a humungous star
to
cease its star-stuff
for the curse of mortality
to hit home

I say star
but it was like you
were a one woman whole
constellation

crafted,
beautifully crafted
in
such special metal
creature of
song
forged
in the flame
of spirit, a truly
golden soul

STOCKFISH

STOCKFISH

my pieces do not flow
they are all
nut
and bolt

whilst the Stockfish pieces
swarm to devour
attack like piranhas

strip my defence down
to bare bones

there’s blood
in the water though you cannot
see it

Oh, that one day my
chess brain might
be Achilles and his Myrmidons
so brutally fleet
and adept
at butchering

slaughter without mercy
and then we shall find

out exactly what you
are made of
my artificially intelligent friend

UNBOXED

UNBOXED

chess:
so many games played
never
a masterpiece

moves missed (many,
many)
victory
falling by the wayside

and so
I do not succumb to
the joy of a world
of sheer
possibility

where every thought
of genius
lies the far side of a
blunder simply
begging to be

blunders of the kind
you can no way redeem

but here I am
sweating my way on
supposed improvement
trajectory

puzzle after puzzle:
mate in five, four,
three, two
find the best move
now plodding through

with each opportunity grasped
tiny chess revelation

this box-like wonder of a
a perfectly square game
all
blocking, line and
angle

divulging the logos
of its beauty,
glimpse of mystical infinity

unpackages the light
takes
me heart and soul

FURTHER

it is amazing
what pressure pushes
a sapling through the soil

think I read a poem
about that once

furthermore,
it”s amazing, history tells us
how slowly, when the poets are
gathered to watch,
the leaves fall

and how they blaze
drifting downwards
less earth
in their nature
more air, and fire,

history tells us too
all you need to know
about mythology
and meaning of tree

how trees weep, bow, fling
out there arms in joy

or gather, in deepest irony,
to watch us
at our darkest

knowing how, in sacred
fable
we once fell

observe us, the chemistry
of rebirth
locked into
their sap fall further, much further