Tag Archives: poetry

ON MY PART

ON MY PART

was going to send you
                  an audio

making love to you
with voice

reaching those spots
other voices fail to reach

but
    I held back, pressed
record

but no speech
on my part
nothing came out

think it must
     be the terrible fear
that something
spoken
        sensuously
will
  bounce back

and before I know it
there I am once more
falling for
      you again

desperate that all the pleasure
I talk, is pleasure
that in my
heart I still
hope of talking you into

lying back on my bed night
after night alone
longing, dreaming

one day
we will touch
   

BYE

climate change
has not touched me yet

maybe
warming is not real, neither
have I been seared
nor likewise broiled

the talk of the Poles South
and North shedding
their huge
ice
   falling apart
does not seem
real to me now

as I lie here
      contemating the eternal
verity that we as species
will continue
      forever as we are

the dread of our demise
      just brush by

ZITHER

zither was what I used to strum
and trombone too
could crank a
tune out of

but all got exchanged
traded for bone bagpipe
at the local
           flea market

and yes, feel I got cheated
I definitely do

bought and sold way
below
     true value like
a cracked Grecian urn

down to thing of singld string
which I can pluck for all I’m worth

but no way its going
     to replace Paganini
                    or be up there
with Hendrix

poets and guitar heroes
       naturally enough seem
to
    incline towards
    early graves

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