Tag Archives: poetry

BARBARIAN

BARBARIAN
  
self
and other

guy in tweed
explaining the magistrate’s
dilemmas of
Lacanian proportions

in that book
by that other guy, who
taught me
   I believe, if
I remember correctly

(so much forgotten about
that younger figure
             so much baggage
had to discard
stuff
     ingrown I had
to excise)

and here I am
trying to come up with
a smart arse question
that
   I hope will
stump the lot of them
their on the
limits of institutional discourse
challenging those linuts
even as
I appear to treat
them with regard

inside outside
         wasn’t always so
clung to orthodoxy for
security when
could barely
string two words together

self and
    other

no AK or RPG but
instinctively feel
am
   now barbarian

shadow made real
apotheosis of
         what once feared

am indeed I believe
     far less question than
a kind
   of solution

ANIMAL

ANIMAL

call me animal
I will be

stuff
of nightmare

the worst animal
you could possibly imagine
and then some

can tear the gates of civilization
one-shot
off its hinges

with
my bare hands, if
you can call them hands

tell me I’m a monster
and before you even
looked up front your notes
on the lectern

a thing will be approaching
as fast as a mamba
here
to help you redefine
your monstrous terminology

add something, that little
je ne sais quoi
to
that utter vicious ugliness

which
you cannot (dare
not ) see but

whose holy truth is
your mirror reflection

ROPES

ROPES

Ah,
what do we
have here

more and more
look at me postings

every moment
in the spectacle of life

you could put
them all together
you would have an album
you would have
a history

something definitive
but,
     call me
old goat
    call me spoilsport
                   misanthrope

but as darkness
gathers and
        they do tighten the
ropes

I fear what I saw
as no change
is every
          kind of  change

same smiling look at me
posture
         look at my face

thought there
            no change

      but seems
the frame, it
                  has darkened
and they have tightened the ropes

TANTAMOUNT

TANTAMOUNT

I stumble
into the temple
past
the guards
and moneylenders
who appear
not to notice

my, how fruitful and prosperous
— a billion, trillion times fold

since
the time of Jesus

and there
in the inner sanctum
I behold a trinity
Pennywise, Baron
Harkonnen
and the hydra-
headed great
of Merkava

brooding on something
hatching their joint scheme

lucky, in fact,
our blessed fortune,
that all this
amounts to
all this
be tantamount to
is a
meaningless dream.

MACHINE

MACHINE

sometimes I slip
into a bad
philosophical space

lose it in
my psyche

flirt with
falling off the rails
when it
comes to my own humanity

thinking
   if you other,
you                             alien

no way
   you think, feel like me,
we never
can
   agree

our speech
        never intersect, no
coincidence
      within belief

shame on me
       shame on me

I bleed, I desire, I want
I need

     I fear
and Oh, my God, how
much I fear

and yet as you look
wonder
          what you see

it could well be alien
    I may be just machine

INVESTMENT

INVESTMENT

on a farm somewhere
in Africa
    everywhere
in the world

lost everything
except, maybe,
my British accent

all those flat Northern vowels
as if opening them out
would be
    like opening a door
to huge pretension

and the dream too
    that is getting packed away
my intellectual heritage
getting sold for
what bit I can get
at the flea market

the book that told us
to be fruitful and multiply
did not have
the nous, the where-
withal to think

billion dollar takeovers
trillion dollar debt

mortgaging all the taxes
ever paid
     to offset the god-blessed
stupidity of
disastrous investment

SPOKEN AS ONE

SPOKEN AS ONE

only one sign
of the zodiac
got eyes

look right through you
see your inner dreamworld
your structure
       in all its proton, neutrons
and wave collapsing
subatomic particles

you ask a question
and you know you will
have to
wait aeons for them
to consult with the cosmos
then
   get back to you

but
    worst would be
if they ask
   themselves a question

never ever
             ever let

them ask themselves
a question

for suddenly you hear
smell the ocean
see
   those eyes
go tsunami

     and then in an
instant

disappeared, shapeshifted
or something

    fins and gills hitting
the deep current on their way
   far away