ON YOUR BIRTHDAY
come to me
on your birthday
Gemini girl
I shall make you
my eternal celebrity
teach you the meaning
of the word “celebration”
make sure you
feel every vowel
every consonant
in your heart
and
every other part
doing your native sign
of the twin me Castor
you Pollux
from dawn on the day
to dawn the next morning
CORDOBA
I was in medieval Cordoba
at the height of its power
and its prestige,
when I found myself, perhaps
having blinked too hard,
in Paris May ’68 and
then in
Times Square New York
sometime yesterday
or maybe tomorrow
watching an Empire slowly
grind itself down to powder
whilst somewhere in these
crowds a Holy prophet and
Christ incarnation
is quietly, deliberately,
avoiding the vanity that
feasts upon
supreme spectacle
(Naomi’s false idol)
searching for what was
lost, destroyed,
that it be found, healed,
restored,
re-established in
single searing moment
of absolute connection
meanwhile
in a playhouse in the centre
of Philadelphia, an outraged
Dionysus plots
King Pentheus’s demise
his worshippers find themselves
swept up by a force
beyond the power
of resistance
awake to the reality
of a primal, divine
revenge
soaked in the blood of
their rapture,
egged on by the god to cross
the presumed defining linit
of humanity itself m.
Signs and wonders:
we so desperate that they
submit
to our systems
not rupture the fabric
of meaning itself
DEAR
Ah, my demented dear,
the spot where your
venom entered me
feels like it has
been struck by
a burning coal
of white phosphorus
our pain is our own ultimately
our pleasure too
but the force that created you
whether it is my channeling of it
or it has burrowed,
somehow
connived its way
into my system
is one with the spirit of all
that this fimds itself expressed as
every manufacture
it now does open itself to
our bodies shape-shifting
at points
together
in some kind of deeply odd
resonance rather
than harmony
no, not harmony
my dear, my demon, my
demented dear
LESSON TO US ALL
my parents
stuck me
in box
to protecr me
from the world
also
one of their core principles
children should be
neither seen
nor heard
and loved sparingly,
as seldom
and as
little as possible
ezpecially if
sweeter and smarter
than they could
ever hope to be
stayed in the box God
knows how long
until Myers Briggs came along
told me
I was no ways such
an introvert, but a rampant
ENFP king cobra
extrovert
waiting for my moment
to burst through the lid
proclaim
my truth, announce
myself to the world
unbundle myself of all
the reams and reams of
relentless (if much
misguided) insistent creativity
emulating
my good friend, sometime
Muse, and fellow
box resident, Ms Sagittarius
Emily
whose cut-throat poetry, razor
images, a
divine lesson to us all
WHY?
why beat the shit
out of them?
surely
with your massive
military industrial complex
your have
more refined, tech-
savvy solutions
or because
since universities began
in medieval Arabia
and Europe must
you go dark
ages on them
besiege these encampments
like you are Temujin’s
horde
ransacking for forage
throwing defenders
down the battlements
all to
show and
tell lesson them
how Plato’s children
and great grandchildren
should scholastically behave
SUSQUEHANNA 2
there are ghosts
in your country
I saw them dancing
in the mist all
along the Susquehanna
one cold January morning
just after 9/11
a couple of miles upstream
from Three Mile Island
and we were talking Civil War mlilitary,
myself and this kindly
African American
Professor of Sociology from
Harrisburg Penn State
him detailing how the Federals and Confederates
were criss-
crossing this territory
playing this cat and
mouse game
only to crash headlong into
each other at a
place called Gettysburg
of course neither of us
back in 2002 could have imagined
twenty so years on this
land would
find itself of the brink of
such a division
where the spectre of such
horror looming again
and those precious
twenty or so days
my sole experience
of America
of breathing the air of
its liberty, if
such is your belief
something the ghosts
trying to tell me, their
cold touch
alerting me
a new world and
forever graveyard
tension
in the spirit world
it seems far-fetched to bridge
the river
with its
Native American name
flowing with the forever
waters of such secrets
leaving
the old lies, the old lies
to spread, make
good trade,
do good business
what ripples outward here I fear
ultimately chain
in its reaction
PANIC LITE.
moral panic
Janet!
something in your pants
something wriggling
in your panties
threatening every
aspect of your identity
have to go
airtight, watertight
totally clamp down
if no one can
breathe
how do you hope
to
however can
you expect to
guide the world
to the light
(nothing we fear
more than your light)
****
moral
panic, Janet!
let’s not forget
those who began it
COLUMBINE
we came across
a fallen city
at its heart
there was
a labyrinth
and at
the heart of this
labyrinth
there was a demon
very little of
this culture,
this society remains
not enough to
give a reasonable
picture of
what they were like
the people
who lived here
except we are
pretty sure
we can infer
they were
extremely militaristic
and, perhaps
in the fear that
the shadow of
their conquests
engendered
conducted
savage sacrifices
of the youth
who perhaps tried
in vain to suggest
more peaceful ways
poems 2 die for