Tag Archives: poetry

SUREFIRE

Ah, yes,
social Darwinism
be your inclination
pitbull terriers —
      they
are your thing;

but would you pit, against
a tank, this,
or some other poem

without ceramic armour,
without armour-piercing
depleted uranium shell?

For all
       poem got going for it
is knowledge of shadow, and
pulse of humanity

and that is
sure-fire defeat, on
hiding to nothing,
as a Nobel Laureate does suggest
himself suggest

Oh, if only tanks could be
stopped in their tracks
by bloke
     with shopping bang

barrels get so stuffed with
gorgeous flowers things
might
       misfire; shells
and bullets simply melt

in the face of all
         that sweetness and light
(and
     metaphor, let
us not forget)
the antennae
   of the species
       wrote on paper, in clay,
on the digital universe

who dare order?
         what dare fire?

but then, who has ever
really talked to the mind of a tank?
               


AS FAR AS

AS FAR AS

 

as far

as poetry is concerned

 

I am

provisional front

 

out

  in left field

since poetry owes me

has not been

so sweet

to me

 

demanding

I constantly exceed myself

 

never too

understanding

or overly kind

 

this poem too

  gung-ho

about

  its sympathy

and charity

 

  and desire to

  enshrine this

  in the hearts

of all of humankind

 

this poem too, no exception,

giving me

  a big fun for my money

 

obstinate in making it case,

protesting its faith

 

whole world of difference however,

between what it seems to be saying

  and how it appears to me

 

 

 

DONE

I am done with dissonance
except where
   it captures the complexion
of what surrounds
gives
    taste of the chaos that
riddles through

harmony is the thing that
must nourish, bring together
                        harmony that
feels
      like
             impossible belief

when last, if ever, were
woken by wings
              hovering above
taking angelic form?

just add a few Pratt and Whitneys
and there you have dissonance

what you figured might be
Michael, Uriel, Gabriel
                drowning out the room
with clamour of regular comic
superhero
        (or, indeed villain)
elevated to cosmic, epic,
mythical proportions
        by virtue of three-
act structure, and titanic movie screen

already you can see it touch it
smell it feel it, let alone
                             hear it

this dissonance, every tiny
breath of harmony
         here in me, here
in the poem

so desperate to distance from
                quietly eschew.

BOOKWORM

BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)

a mysterious book
appears

what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
    quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
    bookcase
is,
  uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)

my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
                          from this tree

though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
          from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
                    the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
                    against the blasphemy
of writing
              reading

but
  who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
      suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?

I write down my dream
                      but then read further, find,
it was
    already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
                                  by the conflicting
gravitational pull
        of dramatically dissonant worlds

I burn
    all I have written
                          the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
    having failed the inquisition

we are
        all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain

stuck
    in
    either hemisphere

doomed
  to tell our tale

                leaves    pages
things metaphoric,
                  synonymous

left
all over the place

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND

IN THEIR NEED TO BOND
“Oh, Mr Bond!” Raul Silva
“Skyfall”

the rogues
want to prorogue

they want to
go Klingon
they want to buccaneer
they are the
best worst pirates
you had
rather you
had never heard
of

when ferocious alpha aliens
arrive to conquer in
(of all things) their mothership

they will be desperate to
host, put on
a show,
suicidal in
their need to bond

play footsie-
tentacle
    under the table

with these creatures
human, or alien,
nothing ever
      on the level

nothing
above board

Sent from my iPhone

ONE DAY ON MARS

ONE DAY ON MARS

Mars bars
Mars bars

the man has been
eating far too
many
Mars bars

his brain
is reaching
escape
velocity

reading too
much Martian poetry

I blame you
Mr Wells, blame
you Mr Raine
blame you Schiaparelli

dug
  all those
canals
in is brain

and above all,
I blame you Mr Bradbury
filling his head
with Martian mushrooms,
telepathic Martians
losing a war
of colonial conquest

most basic parallel
with Earth history
a writer
strolling across
a desert
      plain
munching
        on a Mars bar
(overhead the irregular
shaped
      Phobos and Deimos)
might feel compelled to make

Sent from my iPhone

WAYSIDE

WAYSIDE

Not a doubt
my script is being written
by a severe Russian novelist

giving me really poor lines
a Dostoevsky life

this piece here
being pretty prime example

poem, if that’s what
you can call it
falling
quite by the wayside

and me
wandering through life
seemingly without an arc
let alone
driven by quest, on
pilgrimage

following
the flow (if flow it is) of
words
wherever they go,
wherever they take me

with what false promise,
fatal lure
ot gnosis, wisdom.
sublimation

revelation
that I am no one’s fool,
no one’s text,
no one’s flawed or
anti-
hero, character-whatever

puppet told
to prance
and then put back
in the box

ECLIPSE

ECLIPSE

got kissed
by an eclipse

full
on the lips

nothing sensual:
something industrial
about the sound
of those
suckers locking
or truly confrontational
like the clash
of contending blades

and you
in your headset
oblivious to my
life-and-death love battle

having zoned yourself out
of the untidy range
of all the ambient
swirling noise
and feedback

waiting for the light, the
total light taking
too long
about its dawning

waiting
for new
colours,
different darkness

still
same old old playing
play
rewind
play rewind
the

tunes of our time
tunes of our time

IN SUPPLY

IN SUPPLY

I saw you wearing
the darkest, hugest
sunglasses imaginable

necessarily so, what else
might shield your blue blue eyes
from the Heavenly Sun in
full heavenly glare

light so bright
you would be forgiven
for imagining
that light
to be everywhere

and there you were
tucking not
into ambrosia
but a fat, juicy, meaty
(perhaps
the meatiest pie
imaginable)

knowing that
everything you had
ever dreamt
is
here realized

a paradise of demand
never short
of supply.