Tag Archives: poem

FRIENDS

FRIENDS

would rather be caught
in bed with Stalin’s girlfriend

than have to suffer
the excruciating torture
of listening to you speak
(“speech” here
an euphemism
for demented droning

poor take
on dictatorial power,
resurrection of Caesarism
if you ask me

so let me
stick to my principles
even risking
the Gulag

Siberian subzeroes
to freeze
my skin to bone

but then
       the intelligence of
fellow inmates, their
loyalty to the ideology

believing
in the system, banking
on the real
possibility

that they could well
survive to serve
as confidants
become
   the Boss’ closest friends

AT THE SHEBEEN

AT THE SHEBEEN

I took Wallace Stevens
down to the Shebeen

we dined
on braised cow’s head
and a selection
of South African beers

all of this chased down
with tub-fulls of
salted caramel ice cream

throughout this novel experience
I felt I could detect things whirring
in that machine-like faultlessly
poetic brain

something afoot behind
those placid eyes
finely meshed, sublimely
purposeful

some I dream, gut-feeling,
but also there
in heart
of hearts

he will real all this off
by way of a special poem
cleverly infected
                    in language
flirting with becoming
totally impenetrable to me.

READING MR STEVENS AS SHADE OF COLOURLESS GREEN

READING MR STEVENS
AS SHADE OF COLOURLESS GREEN

close to the shoals
of colourless green
Mr Stevens verged
close
to wreck, was
my initial fear

this I saw
oe believed
I did espy
with my
own two eyes each

mesmerized
though
the sound did sedate whereupon
yes, seduced me
to a danger
I dare
not stomach
actually embrace

and to
think out there
a, whale of a, whirlpool
Charybdis to outdo
closest thing
terrestrial (I meant maritime)
to that fat
killer singulaity
they say drives the galaxy

and yet be
a secret
submarine portal to
an all new
nonsense Wonderland

where
Hatter 2.0 and
the entire 2.0 gang

speak this post post post
Also Sprach colourless
idea
sleeping, dreaming, totally
insomniac
deconstructive
jibber jabber

giving
the poem such
a hard time of it

ideas colourless green
fried to a frazzle
in the desert

or there miraculously in
the mind of Apollo
whilst

he sleeps
lives his cosmic wet dream

read it here, on the page,
then tell me
it might never come to be

DIG

DIG

dig deep enough
and
for this moment,
for God’s and.
all our
sakes

forget your pretensions
of becoming a gentleman
recent
     revelations have
proved that tribe extinct

quibble with me if you must
temper getting frayed
delving
     into dissonance
sounding like
a squiggling saxophone
as Wallace,
    high priest of poetry and
its elite gatekeeper
might have said

but there
of a sudden, shovel scrapes,
spade makes good
motherlode
of dirt
    and debauchery

low organs finding it
hard to be
their own
true selves in
the highest places
searching for
compliance, rule
by fear, a
surrendering niche

calling it
     by its name, spadefuls
of names
as we begin
excavating

proof
     that nobody is above
but then the
below

happens to be worse
than you thought
anyone can go

and yet
     you found this treasure
only to get
it crime scened
with all
that that means

knowing
the sick beating heart
of this
corruption

intense as demons
we will still dig
indeed keep digging

for God’s and
all our sakes
we have nowhere left
to go

TICK

TICK

beware the
time, of the tick
your speech
already rambling
pretty fucked up

and
      tick yourself
you bite, you suck
give yourself
permission to leave
the table Harkonen
blood-bloated

who were meant
to be more symbiotic
than parasitic
in style
of leadership
   delivering so little
promising
so much
   taking so much

you said you
would drain the swamp
end up draining us,

draining us, denying us,
despising us, depriving us,
meant
to uplift

giving new sick meaning
to the image of bounty,
symbol
of overflowing

but
speaking of symbolic
it seems you eschew
all that
is indeed so
better to stick to
the sclerotic, the
crying out for diagnostic ,

tick
   gets pulled
tick gets squashed
all its pilfered, stolen
blood
   one fat smudge
of what
it was
nothing else to see

THERE NEVERTHELESS

THERE NEVERTHELESS

we both got
Daddy pressures
both got
Daddy issues

lifetimes (mine longer
yours, shorter) of pretty much
failed adjustment

tough to find
a resilient forgiveness
strong enoigh to survive
first emotional storm

and since
we are comparing wounds
(our best effort at
any kind of
hoped-for intimacy)
i might suggest
though mine is deeper
yours deep enough
that there
is no
stopping the bleeding

a red
deluge in the making

mine
a wound no one, nobody
ever there
to care about
presume to notice

yours, pages and pages worth
unbandaged, still
outpouring

everyone there for you
(too hideously late) but
there nevertheless

HOLLOW

HOLLOW

I believe it was he
who wrote The Hollow Men
so obvious
person to speak to
fighting this
emptying out
inside me

tried to track
him down
show him my words
ask why they sound
like
empty shells, receptacles,
dull and
distastefully metallic

scoured the deserts, every
academic precinct, places
of learning on
both sides of the pond

Nobel Prize man, last
I heard of him
his very words
being mouthed
magnificently by
Mr Brando, renegade
colonel
   stripped of every shred
of normalcy by
anti-coloniaj war,

by now
the malaise my words
spreading paragraph
by paragraph
turned exponential

a death pallor already
so far down the line hardly
worth talking about.

LABOUR OF LOVE

LABOUR OF LOVE

we are
so unlike

she creates landscapes
has always had
her head
screwed
on tight

sees
the picture
implements
the dream

no place, space
for irony, ambiguity
sudden shift
back and forth

between
high and low
East
    and West
North and
South
inside, outside
nightmare and dream

this very enterprise
premised on
shift and change,
subtlest suggestion
fluctuation

ah, yes
      there we are, out
of nowhere had to
just
   stumble upon it

world’s apart these practices,
so entirely alien
to each other

labours of love
for us both

THIS PICTURE,

THIS PICTURE

it is not what it seems
nothing is
what ot seems

an armada
sailing East
sailing across a
sea of mist, across
Homer’s wine-dark
smooth as
glass
    could not
be unruffled

and in
its secret stockpile
many a
noose of light
for the Sultan’s turret

ships
    big as cities
whose meaning be war
war
   their entire industry
gliding to
their assigned
positions, making headway

nothing being
wrong with this picture

everything wrong
we can
no longer see

everything, everyone,
insisting it is all
a bad dream

the night, so dark
mother of
storms
      about to
break

the story
       so thin we are
about to see through it

far too late
to do anything