END OF AMERICAN TIME,

END OF AMERICAN TIME

big ogre (big bro-gre)
is bombing you
logical next
step after surveiling

wants, covets, loves, adores,
will robber-baron
your oil
    whatever the grade
whatever the viscosity

he wants your
green fields
     urgently needs
to desertificate them

wants you to bow
before his vaunted TV
excellence
   proclaim Emperor
King of Kings
when
it comes to
reality ratings

stroke
    his ego
be nice despite
every character assassination

or lie
down and suffer
if needs be, die,
from this moment of
final conquest
to the end of American time

VOICES

VOICES

if I write this
take a leap
of faith
she will come perhaps
bring you along

maybe you two
will come strolling in
emerge
out of left field

reach first
second base

hard to deal with
curved balls
like these

whack it out the ground
smack a total home run

and so we
all go

innocent as children
longing for a time
when magic could
be
    real
make itself
understood

GORGED

GORGED

pepper
me
with peppermint

better than
that you spear me
with the chewing
gum kind

stick me
in turkish delight
bring me
slowly to the boil
in salted caramel

I am a creature
of taste, always open
to fresh delectation

gorge
    am gorged

sit
at the high table
apex predator
top
   of the food chain

prick me
and will I not
spurt strawberries?

so many rock-hard
nutty never spoken about
truths
   abhorred by
polite society

I need to crack open
sink my fangs into

stick on
a plate so
you can see for yourselves

SOMEWHERE

SOMEWHERE

somewhere
a storm is raging
in a teacup

be that
as it may

we are here eventually
drinking our
last coffee together

took us
so long to get here
such extreme
difficulty
guessing, second-guessing,
wondering
what to say

meanwhile that
teacup storm
is turning cosmic

if we
do not kiss now
before the tea cup storm
reconfigures
our entire Universe

this stupid, last
tragic, triumphant
gesture
   will be lost

love giving the two-
finger salute to
everything that has
conspired
to reduce us
to this moment

decide
upon this day

YET

YET

looks like
someone without
a shred of consideration
took a jackhammer
to my face

someone
sane and rational
and together
so unlike me
my polar opposite
nothing there scrambled,
messed up, Dionysian,
entropic,
   running on fumes
and cosmic radiation
quantum crazy, ever
and forever
in superposition, massively
entangled
    all over the place

so read these lines, thick
as, ley lines, electromagnetic
with worry
      what life does to
you when
what you were told was
sustenance could
not
  have been more venomous
toxic breakfast, lunch,
dinner
    and supper

stamped, branded, sealed,
as is
    the new zeitgeist

everything both
inside and outside
granular, grainy
and against the grain

up close
and personal
with serious gravity,
higgs bosun
false vacuum
strangelet particles and
third law
of thermodynamics

my features
    so convoluted and contorted
look like they were sawn
into shape
from within
      whacked with
a cold chisel, attacked
to try for symmetry by a
fine-toothed jig

life pounded out of me
to get me
regulation tenderized

unadulterated SF dystopia
we just haven’t noticed yet

SHE

SHE

She says our
lovemaking
is incendiary

burns like
a box of matches
a Molotov cocktail

a fat cold war style
multi megaton bomb

but nothing fat
of toxic radioactive
about us two

we are light and lithe
and creatures of light

something sacred,
spiritual
        and, above all,
truly epic when
we make love

and it
radically deviates
from  according to plan

FOR PROFESSOR COX

FOR PROFESSOR COX

anticipating the heat
death of the Universe
I employed an android
to pulverize
my poetry, digitally destroy

shortly before
my own death
the two of
us (android and
I) shook our
fist at the cosmos,
cruel, implacable,
following its cast
iron laws
worst of all
that fucking third one
of thermodynamics

even as this poem
our planet, the entire
human population,
     the great intellectuals of
cosmology, exobiology and
theoretical physics

went quantum field
superposition
bat-
   shit crazy

structure, order, principle,
every virtue
and verity hopelessly
collapsing
     as entropy straddled us
scanned us with its one bad
rotten eye like a plague-infected
Cyclops,

and we on our journey
stuck between Scylla and
Charybdis
never getting home
before the great
      energy equalization
the big bang gods
that do
   sport with us

damned if they even will give us
time for a last drink, barbecue,
spiritual
     supper or
braaivleis

      not to even to begin to think of
   final masterpiece of music,
painting, sculpture or
literature

or physicist coming up
with something inspiring,
redemptive

succour for our ultimately going
to die species out
of hallowed left field

ONCE AND FOR ALL

ONCE AND FOR ALL

An electromagnetic
disturbance hits my brain

you could call it
pain
you could call it pleasure

depends how it
gets measured
as extension
of parameters
as threat
to my system

you my dear
beloved
agent of my demise

over the years never
a greater danger, clearer,
sharper terror

and yet
from
opposite angle

pleasure epic, ecstatic,
off the scale,
              once
and for
all

nicest kind
of nemesis

outright
rewiring of my system.

LEFT-HANDED

LEFT-HANDED

only 6000 of us left
to report on the event
code it
into mythology

some of us, left-handed
some of us
observing our near
extinction from
the summit
of Annapurna

so few of us
to go around
not the time to be choosy
about who
we mate with

so little stock
left to flavour the broth

and talking
of left
     nothing sinister
about being
left-handed
      or living in left field
or so far
into the infra red on
that side
     of the political spectrum

so same same then
now nine ten billion we
can be
    so infinitely territorial
absurdly picky and choosy

me
   following my heart’s desire
(though you might
dismiss it out
of hand
   as unfortunate fetish)

loving all that is there
all we have
      unlocked within
that dark
skin

though I must confess
confess to
loving that
skin
   for itself
entirely, entirely,

utterly ambidextrous
amongst so many
delicious things