DARK

DARK

Oh, what a burden you wear
my Prince of shadow

hard not to think of you
head-to-toe in black

the state
  is a lie

your castle
is death

your family
a prison

and behind this sweet tragedy
what writer has
contrived
        to conceal what

might be
    close to this bone

this sepulcher of a stage
littered
    with all we have
come to hate and love

and thus History arriving
(as it tends to) with
an army

      new flags, iconography,
presence of dawn

this the
    poet knows, indeed
seems steeped in, riddled
with it

something here
so consummately dark.

MASH UP

MASH UP

it’s all
a mash up

can’t get head or
tail of anything

saw this thing bullet-
spewing, bullet-riddled
claiming to
be rational

so, for God’s sake,
plrase exercise, and if not
exercise,
   express extreme caution

when you pitch up
at my door to exterminate

careful not to throw
me and the baby
out with the boiling bathwater

as you flood through
every room with
mandate
       to control
penchant to wipe out

JUNGLE GYM

JUNGLE GYM

I ate my jungle oats
you are your jungle oats
you ate my jungle oats
I ate your jungle oats

we ate our own and
each other’s jungle oats

not at the watering hole
but in bed together

you telling me that aliens
came to this planet Janet
tens of thousands of
years ago
    as is recorded on
scroll and parchment
to build the pyramids
and screw
      our woman

the former with sonic resonance
and photon matter creation
technology

           maybe, safe to say,
pretty much
the latter too

and you trying to tell
me that
    Noah’s Ark was actually
a saucer-shaped vehicle
(like alien craft on the cover
of an
Amazing Stories 50s Sci-Fi
magazine)

nothing more lewd or leering
than one of those aliens
desperate for
    the feeling of humanoid
tits and shit

and me making all sorts
of irreverent and disgusting
sexual puns
        during the entirety of
her discourse

obviously not the kind of
civilized fore and interplay
that would lead
      with neat evolutionary
procreative logic

to our own little
trans-linguistic
         conjugation

and most
intimate and
         nearest thing

to
cosmic encounter of
way more
   than three-dimensional kind

EQUATION

EQUATION

energy
is mass

and space
and time
are
money

me
I wasted my
time
studying
philosophy
writing poetry

so can tell
your what’s-the-
matter
    moment is
pure
   postmodern
spiritual existential

ennui of life in a
post material age

nobody
     offers a phosopher
a penny for
his
    a shilling for
her thoughts

or to speak
the value or meaning
of anything these
days

just nowhere
     for the human
mind to expand

and all
     that wasted
storage               space

BONEY

BONEY

I apologize
for not having watched
your film yet
(hope it will
be as
good as Gladiator
in which you
played an
entirely
different character)

my supreme Leo commander!

let me kick this off directly
by telling you
how
   much I love that hat
would
(if indeed I had one)
surrender
      my Empire
for that hat

which to me seems so solar
to
   proclaim you
as Helios himsrlf

on top of your head on entire
solar hemisphere
  (rising,
          setting)

of course, the hemisphere
below supplied
by the bottom
         of your
now
  my
     gigantic head

Empire for your bicorne
hat
     being
              our fair trade

nothing could be nore
Napoleonic

            be about continuaton
of your legacy

      not even
ten ghousand
YouTube videos on

your rise
     to power, sweet
              Josephine

and the utter tactical
brilliance of
             Austerlitz itself

than me
wearing that bicorne bonnet
en bataille

THIS THING

THIS THING

this thing, suffering,
never
   thought about it really
when we were
together

before the fracture,
time of complete loss

yes that short time
of beauty
         I do not remember
much about it now

why, how
it could not be sustained

thinking about the drive home
immediately after our
                    marriage

no reason to think
of suffering

          suffering there lying
in wait somewhere
outside us

or, already primed, set
to destroy,
        lodged within
     

SHADOW

SHADOW

I misremember you

still
in your shadow

anniversary
of your departure

in size and proportion
shadow
     is giant

sometimes you cannot even
capture it on
old cinemascope screen

and you were giant too
when in wonder
first saw you
       peering into my cradle

wondering
    what you were thinking
who or what
you were

still wondering
what you
            were

what
      you are (immortal
philosophical question)

what you were thinking
all those years
              shrouded in shadow
what
you were thinking.

I remember you.
   Trying to forget
    does not come easy at all.

TRANSPARENT

TRANSPARENT

“Différance does not precede the elements of the opposition it makes possible; it is their mode of existence.” Christopher Watkin

don”t say
transparent

when best you can
aim for
ever hope to
achieve
is translucent
(thus ducking
quite neatly
the
   thorny issue of truth)

but then there is context
and then there is history

whose meaning
is deferred until
you
    write the thing

time lag
    side step

           every excuse for
spin, circumlocution, Derrida’s
Gitanes-smoking
deferral
       of what if is

Oh you Cartesians, what could
be more opaque than
your
    methodology of demons

heads spinning like tops
whipped by sticks

viciously, vicariously

what difference if the
fate is epic monotony

could your
      metaphysic possibly make?

TICK TOCK

TICK TOCK

tik tok
stop the clock

bin what’s there
gotta stop
the new narrative
at
   all costs

tik tok
anticlockwise
we got

    all is
on schedule
need to
     total shut up shop

those kids so misguided
will interpret
how they
         will
hear
    what they want

truth so disatrous, if it
spread to
          entire credibility

carefully cultivated
fiction
    of humanity

so tik tok
tik tok

don’t like what it’s speaking
need to
          bomb scare
that ticking

take down
      that clock