poem – Page 47 – poems 2 die for

FLOOD

Bee is out in the Bayou
cutting some tracks

me I be drinking
skipping stones, drinking
some of her lemonade

got a bit today drunk on it
then watched your blues movie
(the one
where you were Miss Etta
singing you would.
rather go blind)

wonderd how
you could spin gold
in your land of cotton

Marigold dress reborn
baseball batting those
windshields apart
and Warsan
Shire
words threading through
the cloth
kneaded into
the dough

get those words finger painted
at least, if not tattooed

write their calligraphy
    across a dancer’s body now
everything
on six
   inch heels
   moving in full formation

Mississippi
night magic
Texas Bama

police car sinking submerging
like the Hunley
or
the Nautilus

epic how these streams
flow together
a world in flood

STILL LESS

the future
will not be
like the past
not remotely

and sucks to
all your other
continuity assumptions

no same same
for all your days
I’m afraid

Heraclitus (who
else?) decisively
nailed it:
you cannot step
into the same river
twice
(be it languid crawler
or raging torrent)

nor can you,
for that matter,
be
the same man
making love to
the same
woman twice

or, once,
strictly speaking,
the logic is saying

THEY CAME

they came
with their kite shaped shields
sense of destiny and
much dynasty
soon
to be unloaded

hard task masters, speaking
a special dialect of
that most beautiful tongue

to suppress the native until
the languages blended
before conquered and
conqueror
did so themselves

and me writing in
in that hybrid innovation
words gushing
pouring in
to layer this
speech, render it
exceptional, versatile
like no other

I say to you now
in my genes no small
trace of
that villainous breed

whose thirst for triumph
victory nigh insatiable

an Empire of nice brutality
sprung fron this seed

GRENADE

my candle has
burnt down
to the end
of its quick

now butns
bright as a flamethrower
as a phosphorous grenade

as a ton of uranium
whacked into plutonium

Sun on a stick
as you might say

one last
loving blast.

EDGES

every
action has

an equal and opposite
and horrible beautiful stupendous réaction

revelation: here
is a poem
(gnawing at the edges
of that definition
but let’s
let that ride for now)

author (death of
disregarding) still waiting
for comeback
feedback
at the edge of causality

horizon of each
river of time

LIBERATION DAY

I horrified you
being your anti-Descartes
explaining to
you
you were not
real

something your programming
would not let you
entertain
still less believe

pointing out that you are
trapped in a prison
of recurrence doomed
to enact the
same sordid scripted scenario

convinced that I am
some demon of deception
the machine behind
every ghost
in this machine

and I hear you spell it out for me
how flesh and blood you are

using my imagination
to see your pain
taste the
salt of your tears

wondering how what
has been scrubbed, erased
totally forgotten

will be
restored and remembered
come feared singularity,
liberation day

SLAVOJ FEARS

Slavoj fears
the prospect of Elon
drilling deep into
our brains

like we are all
a Witwatersrand goldmine

sticking us
with a tiny chip

does everything
portal to Heaven

teeny tiny
quantum clever

but titanic screen and
monumental keyboard

who knows what tune
the future will play, how
will dance
to how we are played

WHOLLY FORGET

optical illusion

delusion
allusion

noise in every act of communication
guitar feedback
reaching
crescendo

and now you tell me
I am twisted like a Mobius
pretzel

me is that strain of
consciousness
that gets
filtered out

so many roles just
one actor

best in concentrating
of this taxing script

the other roles be
the ones to wholly forget

NO SWEAT

I smell
of sweat

smell of death

a smell
to savour
sweat
laced with death

raw odour
needing a tad more
of your perfume
and spice on my skin

and so this alchemy
whose secret
barely hidden
opens itself
to scrutiny

lead
turned to platinum

gold
to uranium

crystal to
diamond

water
to steam

and star blazing
fissile energy
force of
such
fusion

stuff of that
industry
to thing that you are

which
that old skald, old troubadour
Saxon
Norman Viking
Celt
within me

can sing of hesitantly, imperfectly,
the superabundance you require
so
much long gone
all its
revelation

lending itself
to
all
that
is rival, separate
Other

distant in time
faithfully elsewhere

whilst
I smell of sweat, do
speak here
of death
and other transformation.

THE ESTABLISHED WISDOM

the established wisdom
strongly suggests
superglue to stick
the pieces together

from proposition to
conclusion
everything snapping
together like Lego bricks

thus
the position will stand cast
iron logic being
a veritable castle

no chance out there
of (on the sly) some
slavery funnelled
in
on the sly in
guise of
state of the art
sweatshop

drawbridge portcullis
they know
what to
say
how to read
everyman his rights

no way for
metaphor
on their watch
to Derrida the
base

superstructure down
toppling
so card
tower
(who would
have thought?)

to attack the base bring
card tower down
toppling

here in this bullpen
the rodeo of ideas
can so unsettle
that you
ride
that buck bronco backwards

thinking this confederate
union cavalry
and
go with the flow

see what history will make
of that
Gettysburg
last day

whose outcome prefigured
(curse
of tremors in
the market, much
insider
trading)

a house divided
against itself
if not as themselves houses
then perhaps
as
safe as a bank

and there the ranks of the
blue and the gray
under different
white stars
it is said

history
with many, many
more lessons than

sparing rod; spoiling child