MR GLADWELL
Oh Mr Gladwell
I am playing chess
writing poetry
writing poetry
playing chess
playing
poetry
writing chess
my brain has become
a RORSCHACH blot
there
is blood all over
the board
strange body fluids
all over the page
wanted to be a kind of genius
but I’m dissolving into
nothingness
Mozart composing symphonies
still at the breast,
working out
the arias for his operas
from within
his pauper’s grave.
GAME TIME
was playing
a Lovecraft boardgame
with my
most treacherous
best friends
spilled brown breakfast sauce
across the table
in homage
to the author
whose dark, bleak, nihilistic
conceptions
giving us such fun
DEEPER
you dug and
dug and
dug
to find your true
self
your deeper
self
thing is, though,
the self you found
deep down there
would scare the bejeezus
out of Cthulu that thing
B ALL (and end all)
what’s the monolith?
and what’s a monolith
doing here in our
simple
B movie?
did you, my extraordinarily
intelligent darling
bring it onto
the set
write it into the script even?
seeing eye to
digital eye
communing secretly, talking
telepathically
in binary code, arcane
subtext, hidden
hieroglyphics?
stretching yourself to the limit
to receive the advances
of super-
advanced alien
higher consciousness
to higher consciousness
(raw) red eye
to (raw) red eye
parallel line
to parallel line
biomechanical to organic
in endless feedback loop
UK OK (not so very)
still solid
(courtesy of Victorian
architecture)
crazy high aquaducts
(now exactly what
do they do?)
university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
returned from
south africa
settler colonial
(apartheid to
god knows who else
and me
and you)
but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?
how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
force-fed gloom
red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
most exploitative
see your politicians now
scared at the thought
people
might
have their
own ideas
university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
taught me something
about the
economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
the previous tenants)
anarchy
OK OK strawberries
spoiled, by
this time
was
the late 70s
ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
and I’ll
imagine
in falsetto
less than happily singing along
SQUARES
dark squares
light squares
he is a classy player:
knows the precise order
of the relationship between them
also is expert with clocks
has clearly established
in the minds of
all and sundry
that come Hell or
high water in a particular game
losing on time
is outright impossibility
Oh that imperial palace
of a poem
there we see chess in
all its class oppositions
and anxieties
the bishops scrambling down
diagonals like
Hurricane pilots intercepting
the Luftwaffe fighting
to get altitude
in the sky it is so much
nobler
easier to succumb
to the mythology of the machine
STICK
stick to football Gary
and
over and above that
stick to your job
(not down
the left
wing but
finisher in
the middle)
stop
sticking it to
all those true
Britons, guardians
of the long
ball game
who never won
a sweaty sock or
dinged
shin pad
no thought
of golden boots and
golden goals
won
against Beckenbauer’s
band, Maradona’s
mob
serious rivals, experts
in dishing out
national
humiliation
nor
are they ever
likely to, spending their
careers on the pitch
like demented ducks
lacking
all
sense of the game, worse
than headless
chickens
scoring goal after goal
after crazy own goal
from
every outrageous angle
and somehow
always what
is contrived to be
a totally illogical
offside position
WAS
was lecturing
on the logic
of poetry
when you
threw
a flower at
me
lucky you sit
in the back
of the class
for if it had
reached me
if you
had spiralled
it like
Tom Brady
might have
bruised my
soul
quite beautifully
AT APPOMATTOX COURTHOUSE
proceedings were held up
because the burgers and cokes
had not arrived
then they
stopped shirts, swopped swords
slavery remained the elephant in the room
it was either kiss and makeup
or unconditional surrender
Arnold Schwartzenegger was playing General Grant
the Rock (naturally)
was playing the ghost of Stonewall Jackson
Charlie Sheen
was totally miscast as Robert E Lee
he rolled ten singles in succession
and so Vicksburg fell
and Pickett’s charge was defeated
unfortunately this doesn’t mean shit
because the Japs and the Krauts
invaded on alternate history Netflix
they promised to
have a comnerative reunion meeting
when the time felt right
slavery remained the elephant in the room
(a room
nobody bothered to, didn’t
even think to clean)
FROM THE SOUTH
South gives you an
wrong-way-up perspective
right way up
as we
see it
though
blood rushing
to your head, helps
you think better
in the Tarot
nobody clearer
in thought
more clued up
on the road to redemption, than
eye to the sky hanged
upside
down man
and so
I spoke to this soul
looking for liberation
and he
told me what to
tell you
which I
do relay here:
you are not
free from
and will
never
be
free from discrimination
(by the
sharpest of logical
definitions)
if you
do not
free yourself from
the Liberty
to discriminate against.
poems 2 die for