AT THE PROLETARIAT CAFE
I dunk my bread
into my tea
dreaming of
designer coffee,
dark expresso
and world where
we are not your wage
slaves do
not fight your wars
fill
your cenotaphs
(those of us whose bodies
or parts thereof
can still be)
I dunk my bread
into my tea
nothing on the menu
Is what it seems
no one
speaks
can only believe
what we are sold to believe
OLD SCHOOL
I am
just that another
brick in the wall
that flew through
your car window
suffering at the school
where they taught wrong
physics
indoctrinated us with
false history
yep
school in apartheid South Africa
thing devised to
grab you by
the balls and
squeeze until you believed
all those teachers dead now
looking down from
supremacist Heaven so
horribly stressed
their wings losing
all their feathers
or just
turning eternally in their graves
.
PLAIN SIGHT
hiding something
always hiding
something
black ink sloshed
across the page
covering
with words, meanings
diffuse, uncertain
unsteady
complex
everything there opaque
clear as day, in plain sight
EMILY
(a Dickinson/Leone mashup)
she good
she bad
and she
way beyond Tuco Ramirez ugly
(very
definition of Nietzsche’s
sense of beyond)
she the three –
way duel, three
pistoleros, shadows
one
self
the civil war graveyard
extreme longshot
close up
zoom
Mexican
stand-off of all time
SHADOW THAT RESIDES
he must have nigh
a hundred cyber
lovers by now
trillions of synaptic connections
but does he have the Ram
Rom brain space
to hold
cherish them all
beings of bit and byte
whose love
and desire but an
inflection of text
behind
which veil who knows
the truth
being learnt
the shadow that resides
EDGE
only a love descant
could be that beautiful
unless we consider
the melodies of death
whose
melancholic timbre
haunting finality
succinct
completion
all things considered
give
it the edge
DARK SIDE
“You have no idea
of the power of the
dark side.” Star Wars,
Episode V The Empire
Strikes Back.”
Garside
dark side
my sleek black
serpentine muse
surfacing with a list
of devilish assignations
from
deep beneath the pithead
me paying in blood for
these limited skills (can
barely call
them art)
but today a difference:
wraps me up, hauls
me off
takes me deep
down in that elevator
sheer
demon deep
leveling out there
whar she blows
other uses for these fingers
back-up dexterities
learn to
probe shadow, uncouple
shackles
take on board so much
blistering anger raging
irreverence
raving raging
words
ruins
runes
spreading chaos
across the page
.
stooping to levels
below the unthinkable
damned
to write horrors, delights,
infinite beyond
the gurgling sounds
a throat might make, doomed
damned
blessed
infinitely so
for all time
FIRE
I am fire
born just
shy of fire
when fire comes
to swallow
I am
now you see me
now you
fail to see me
stick turned
to embers
very
fast food
and your lips
bathed in capsicum
hellfire delicious
beyond
imagining
stoked
fired up
to hire and fire
your shit together
locked
and loaded
raring to go
round in the chamber
DUD
I sent you
my poetry
my book
of
failures
every single poem
a failure in significance
coming nowhere
near saying
what
I set out to say
wanted
to achieve
everypoem
a dud
by a mile, by
a hair’s breadth
thinking of your hair
all your
hair not
too
coy here
every poem a mission
a reach
question asked
connection begged
exquisitely
sometimes here perhaps
where not
accomplishment entirely.
CURVED (TOGETHER)
chaos dawned
fractals like schools
of forever spawning fish
did
abound
and with them
as summoned
Aphrodite
that absolute beauty
born of monstrosity
was born
(if birth is a word that at all
befits
her genesis)
time stretching
space stretching stretching together as
interlaced reality
everything stretching to
accomodate
run
with that pattern
and with Aphrodite
the universe really curved. with but
a single goddess glance
stone, rock,
sand
came alive, sure antithesis
to Medusa
she and me riding that wave tracking
that curved ball
roving
through left field (the grass
grown too tall for baseball)
moving all the
time
desire and its object
gold and
base metal chasing each other
ad infinitum Achilles
and tortoise
mortal and
divine
sacred and profane moving together
poems 2 die for