Tag Archives: poetry

NO EASY MEASURE

NO EASY MEASURE

there are many ways
to start a poem
maybe an image, a theme
a rhythm
    bouncing
around in your head
snake-like
    rasp of  word

many ways too,
to enter a poem
linear or
       non-linear
syntactic
or symbolic

feeling your way
set to full tactile

             or up
for helicopter shot
to view
    as mosaic
put
everything
in perspective

then
fill in the detail
                induced, deduced
seduced
at your pleasure

although
          linger on
this thought
if you will, let us dissect
this
dark treasure

only
fair to point out,

to leave a poem, however,
(speaking
      of seduction)
is no
easy measure

here is the poem
here is we are
                     unexpectedly
together

not so many ways down
from that height
this height,
routes
     out of the labyrinth
                              this
labyrinth

safe and
   without cost

hardly enough
    to count on the
fingers
of one hand

so many surrendered
to the poem, dissolved,
got
   absorbed by
poetry

something about
the beauty
    of this python still
to comprehend

as it
   closes the circle
you now mine forever

A WORD

A WORD

let me have a word

let me fill
you in
from a poetry

am going to need
twenty, maybe
thirty
thousand
characters already

oops1 sorry,
my apology

did I say
“characters”?

that was a bit
of a fatal Freudian slip

I meant to say “words”;
no sorry: lines

no I am completely wrong

in the wrong

to do this justice
I need to write
the final
death count
as poems

RICH

RICH I am waiting, searching for my perfect being but I fear she will be made of anti-matter altogether, too complementary and so in the face of an oppositional universe I turn to poetry, just vegetate scour for a physics that might suit md better, sweeter, finer truly orgiastic resonating like bongos played in bars and night clubs by some California genius spirit a figure so rich pushing the outside of the envelope with every squiggle of chalk smooth stroke of his pen

BETWEEN EXTREMES

BETWEEN EXTREMES get twisted by the cynicism blown away by the naked irony throws me this way and that up and down the human spectrum and yes I can do Socrates can do Atilla can do St Francis and do Genghis Kham in my genes I am both Norman Viking and Catholic martyr every word here part of that inner negotiation solution plotted in the dialectic and reconcilation between extremes between extremes

FORGIVE ME

FORGIVE ME forgive me O poets of Palestine for I sat round idly looling for rhymes, for couplets whilst you were targeted and killed something about the word even at its softest, most musical cannot but be a threat to the iron mind of power and so I am trying to compose somwtgknv here asking for forgiveness looking for redress but my imagination is failing feels annihilated have no means to express how it feels, what it means to be hit by bombs and bullets in thd middle of a poem thrse tired old feet, these crippled legs putting up such resistance as I hazard a step in your broken, bloody shoes

MAMBAS

MAMBAS so complacent and complacent yet again left-brain, right wing such recipe for human stupidity deluding yourselves into expecting slow worms when we came as mambas — venom measured to make maximum use of every critical drop and prempting rebuttal speed off ths charts impossible to catch us and how you floundered losing your sense of place and actual places slipping into paralysis mamba neurotoxic venom stealing into your system taking slow but incontravertibly catastrophic effect