poem – Page 38 – poems 2 die for

FIELD OF PLAY

yet another humongous
rock approaching

coming at toxic velocity
to slap the dinosaur out of me

see if
    I can bounce back
school
     of hard knocks

take
it on the chin

but
did underestimate me
and my technical prowess
a devotee
sensei

of the
beautiful game

as I rose like a missile
to meet aforementioned comet
with the meat
of my forehead
clear my lines head
it away having
a neck of steel

sent that interstellar off
course trollop back
where
it came from

teach it to steer well
clear of this our
beloved Terra
this bright blue
ball that
we care so much for

never never
ever again
love itself so
shamelessly aimlessly
into our field of play

MEANWHILE HERACLITUS

Whichever way
you looked at it

it was one-forty-five
a quarter-to-two

into
the last cake-slice of the hour

a moment in time
rapidly disappearing

alongside him
a wife once
in her own right an
accomplished musician

longing to
pipe a
merry tune

meanwhile the air the Earth
and without doubt
the Sun

felt perplexed
if you forgive
me for saying so

the Sun
not yet risen

the Moon eerily mirrored
in that one time river

whilst
the logic of stepping
in and out
smudging, blurring
time as we know it

meanwhile Heraclitus
seeing/not seeing
wife-wise
life-wise

chaos of being
the writing on the wall

HERITAGE

am paddling
in the North Sea

determined to rediscover
my Viking heritage

a hardy people, unlikely
to flinch in the face
of danger
or pain

whilst I
find myself
forced to withdraw

return to dry land
almost instantly

avoid the visceral agony
unbearable suffering
of a frozen toe

PARALLEL CUTTING

Lord Oda
is sharpening his blade

the women
look at me
nervously

my poem

falling to pieces.

BEYOND (THE SIN IN CAPSAICIN)

heard you got
an endorphin high
reading
my poe
found every syllable
a green red orange
capsaicin démon
scalding your tongue

wafting you up on
the wings of those breezy
dreamy
pain-deadening chemicals
of your
own vintage and special
manufacture

carrying you effortlessly
into the bluest of beyonds

PANTHER SLEEPS

panther sleeps
in the fur of his brain
Rilke echoing

what panther dreams
is that
his cage is empty
yet still locked, still closed

wants to be be able
to ask the question
what it all means

terrified lest
he awake

to find himself gone
to find himself here

LONG BEFORE THE FIRST CRUSADE

And legend has it
as they turned from
the stable
to journey home
knowing
nothing would ever
be the same

Melchior whispered
something in the ear
of proud Balthazar

lost
to history but

it is believed
to express profound
appreciation of
the unique
sublimity of their
experience

what they
felt so blessed to
have witnessed

the Sun
now rising, a
new dawn
an
awakening

although, of course,
it might just as well
be all
downhill
from here.

BLAST

headshrink me and
stitch my mouth up tight with sturdy twine

lest I whine
make a sonic spectacle of myself

emit a series of dreadful
garbled inarticulate noises
like an animal in pain
or some one
who should know better
proferring a
crude imitation of

someone
with Tourette’s

stitch me up tight
so all the bad words
being blocked
fail
to jump out of me
strut and
shout
parade about

go total carnival
dance their worst dance

degenerate into the realm
of lewd, graceless
profanities

exquisitely decadent vignettes
and everything, for all
that we
declare as disgraceful,
distasteful

nevertheless cannot argue it
is anything less than a blast

(the minds of our greatest fear
clean clipped as
tidy gardens their

fingers
on the button awaiting
code command)

SURRENDER

she wrote her poem
every metaphor
bullet-pointed

every syllable
metal-jacketed

every image
a grenade

when she let rip
a whole belt, an entire clip,

out of ammo
she had nothing left
to attack
defend herself with
not a word
to work with

her critics sensing this
out of blood
moved in
for the kill

forcing her surrender
unless
there was no surrender

EASY

easy to draw
analogies, parallels
but also hard

here I am in the realm
of the luscious isosceles and
prudent equilateral

at right angles
to you
dealing with gravity
and the curvature
of space-time

sliding along the hypotenuse
reading your front page,
back page

headlines
and all about you corporeally
the behoves to
be on page three

my life
spread like toast
with marmalade
like centrefold
like
money shot

and time is money
need to drag out
time together
collapsing
the distance
between us

like we together exact
same hyper-sensual moment

hitting that
Venus Mars conjunction
lightspeed