poetry – Page 100 – poems 2 die for

TROUBADOUR TOWN

we spent a day
and night
in
troubadour town

you
with your passable Italian
fiuenr French

and me
with smatterings
of Esperanto and
Provencal

rode every ride at the carnival
having
put our books down

feastimg on pizza and shwarmas
homemade beer and bread
tasty bake potatoea
and
much meat pies

and me a card-
carrying vegan before
this date
was less contrived

than magically
came about

and at
the day’s dizzy pinnacle
the death
dipper at its height

we wondered if this
were Heaven if
Heaven might
be real

then
plummeted (air
sucking the
screams
out of
our lungs

runaway trian on
crazy
tiny
track

full
roller-
coaster down

can sing
of our day in troubadour town

IN THE REALM OF RHYME

her hair cascaded
down her shoulders
in golden
rhyming couplets

but, as Princesses go
she was a woman
of guile
and unbridled cunning

needing to be so
for the underbelly of
folktale and
dark rhymes for
children

tell of deep evil woods
where gingerbread houses
call out to
brother and sister to
eat
and be eaten

the ones so sweet with
all that hand-in-hand innocence
as every
evil witch knows
being the tastiest of all

and even
deeper into the woods
there the gray ogres have
built their
own factory

behind searchlights and wire
setting insane quotas of
aah as
their target each day

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species
                       wherever they
happen to
eke
   out their existence
East, West
North, South
     of the Continental shelf

and so me
not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle
along the tiny tarmac roads
that slither like
snake trails
(not
weave their way)
between the graves

not much interest in my
life

this broken life

scheduled to crack somewherw
along the line
                pre-
programned like watch with
Mother, heartache,
failure
      sex sharp and sweet/bittersweet
vanilla, spiced, chocolate,
salted caranel
        melting pot and
set
   to repeat but
not quite
   liks clockwork


before which
(and before
       post cigarette or
thin after mints)

my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
let this poem end as
dead at
point blank range
as (fuck him!)
Larkin’s does

hard to
top him for
negative inspiration

SUREFIRE DEFENCE

I must thank you
for teaching me chess

as I said, as
I told you i know
nothing about the game
have
never played
chess before

and so we played the
strip version
where every piece
I lost
I had to divest
myself, forfeit
some or other
item
of clothing

and so it was
you swept across the board
gobbling up my pawns
and devouring all
my larger pieces

until I was mated, naked
as a baby

long into the night
those victory celebrations

you not notcing
my bishops on
same colour diagonal
missing every
Knight fork, every
en passant

but
a bit of
a conflict of interest here

working on my own
and your own
grandmaster ratings

someday I must
teach you every
gambit
in the book;
every surefire defence

I TOLD MY ANDROID

I told my android
she was Jane Austen

told her
that she was
Sylvia Plath

told her that she
was Mary Shelley watching
the monster that
is me scratching
at her window

gave my
dearly beloved android
a whole smorgasbord
of literary
identities

GENOCIDE

genocide
is a
floating signifierl

they do it
do it
we
do it

you do not
however i am
sure
lcontradictipn
In terms
do not
do it
could not do it
could not
even think it at all

and while , meanwhile,
the soul of humsnity
rushes itself
to rapture
drowning in blood
and viscera

i have to dig deep,
trepan, drill
into skulls scoop
out with dessert spoon

to find any sign or
admissable
evidence

of that
slippery word at all

TWICE

was sittimg in the
recreation centre of
the Event Horizon

watching the movie
Event Horizon

having my
doubts about this mission

all that horror footage
getting me
to think twice

PERFORMATIVE

the wind did not find
a door thought solid
much of a deterrence

simply carved its way
across the room

tornadoed about me
as if stairway-aspiring
to go spiral galaxy

was in no mind
to deliver blessings unless
shotgunned, scattered
in every direction
nailing you
nailing me
the wounds and blood
fresh and sublimely
red as
if sudden stigmata

and what
might we do save
self-
submerge and drink it
all in eternal

moment of brutal
beauty so
almost (nothing
closer)
beyond everything

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