Tag Archives: poem

POSEIDON HIMSELF

you still pulling, tug-of-warring
on that single silver strand
(or could it
be golden?)

hoping that something bites
and then everything unravels?

fish
   of fantasy, of your
dreams
  letting itself get reeled in

Yes,
I used to fish when I
lived at False Bay
catch white steenbras
and haarders using
smelly red bait

mainly from the pedestrian bridge just
below the hall named
after Theodore Weizmann

but you
fishing from a boat
and, at this
precise moment
I am there in the prow
practically sitting
next to you

(we do not
have to be inside the theatre
to break the fourth wall)

any place will do
any place
that can allow us
an interface, provide
us with a boundary

special sphere slash dimension
perfect to allow us
negotiate
where we are

so much
     here with a sort of
Old Testament flavour

not Sinai but
mouse mountain and
               my first little
school
   in South Africa
pocketed beneath

both of us
turned confederate
wrestling with that
nylon line
who knows what
tiddler, guppy, denizen,
demon
    we are reeling in, maybe
the great Leviathan (or one
of them) from
the blazing
words of
       scripture itself

maybe
baby
     great white or
sleek and lethal adolescent

or (with outrageous luck)
an eager Nereid, Nemo’s
Nautilus,
      perhaps Poseidon himself

builder of Troy, shaker
of continents,

oozing with the raw power
to remind us
               we are not gods
we are
barely signifiers

but when we cast, we called
          they were
bound
to come

 

BLEACH

crossing a
cultural desert
gun ports
not entirely closed

I come well-prepared:
my sextant and
my astrolabe likewise,
runes for divination,
charms
woven into cloth
and many
a magnetic stone

tattoos, furthermore,
inked from head to toe
all over
my body

a magnum opus, a script
that the algorithm predicts
all of you, to a man (and
a woman)
will be sorely tempted
to read allegorically

yet what we have here
should elicit no parallels
the text
     plainly needs no
code decyphered, simply
proffers illustration
of famous
historical scenes

actual ones, as well as
by virtue
    of being counterfactual,
never actually happening
there solely
     to confound, or
to tease

in this
     the last of my kind I
am without question

such text
as a matter of policy and
dear human salvation

removed from
all my bretheren (sisterhood
likewise)
          purged from
public space erased
by fire, with bleach

****

HOW MANY

how many
more were
than
    waves in the ocean
pebbles on the beach

who scribbled endlessly
fighting that
worst of wars
against silence
and futility?

writing
for themselves, for their
beloved, for
anyone
prepared to read
at all

see
   how hard it is
to craft
something
for the cosmos

words
        lost in the
depths of deep space
                         yet

impossible
not to write at all

and this,
      my friend, I
am far
too sensitive, afraid
to tell you

this is the way
with every act of
creation

this the failure
defines us all

****

BEGINNING

Hamlet died
last night
and
  I died
with him

he at Elsinore
me in the front row
just below the stage

him
   in the light, me
in darkness

neither of us
of the firm belief
we spent enough
time together
to truly know
each other

barely talked, even
thought of establishing
a relationship

and yet
at that meta moment
we both died
and were revived
with curtain call
and, much pleasantries

things
    taking back
to the beginning
yet unable
to erase all that
shared death pain

LILT

I listened
to an audio book

of Snoop Dog
(AI generated) reading
Crime and
Punishment

in English and
Dostoyevsky’s
original Russian

both
    (sign of the times) with
a nice background melody,
hip-
    hop beat
and sweet, infectious
   L.A. projects’ weed-
smoke lilt.