poetry – Page 3 – poems 2 die for

SELFIE

paint a portrait
of all the people
in the head
of William Shakespeare

give us a snapshot
of that essential process
that rendered
an experience
valid
for all time
(or so
his most enthusiastic
proponents will
claim for the Bard
of Stratford
(controversies of authorship
here for convenience
laid to one side)

wonder if anything
in there, in that
supreme consciousness,
ever
felt radically wrong,
wholly inside out

wishing
it had more time, could
work faster, be
forever more settled

despite the egregious connotations and
political considerations
of the settle verb

Lancaster York,
Cavalier
Roundhead, Yankee
Confederate

blue state
red state

heard some American historian
claim them
the same civil war

here
tethered to the Pole
whether North
or South
it be we
find absolute positionings

around things
secretly hidden or
transcribed with
scarce fidelity

those figures we
did talk about
characters of standing
some of
such construction, resonance, depth, power and
(sometimes)
majesty

wandering from
stage to stage
theatre to theatre

like some
royal procession, carnival
event

BEN

having just returned from
a workshop on ethics
in the innermost
circle of Hell

hot foot, exhilarated,
ready to go

and being
back with
that wisdom am
kind of
a man
on a
mission

can
safely say
to all
gathered here
this torchlight parade

we got it
all wrong
got the logic all wrong

it is not that they
are to be punished
because they are bad

but that
they are bad
because they
are to be
punished

this confirming
the promulgations
of big bad Ben
of the tribe of Ben

a man, or should we say entity,
divine in his devilry
demonic
in his divinity

nothing sulphurous
no toxic poison gas
pouring out of his nostrils

this not
the kind of evil
you would expect to
proclaim itself
and yet
it does
and yet it
does

reveals itself to the world
from the pretty low-key heart
of his tacky execution chamber

unlikeliest avatar of
noneless than
the Devil himself
priding himself on
a golden achievement:
supreme infiltration

a stand up guy
slipping the noose
around
necks himself

***

the game given away
but we
don’t give
a shit because
mentally zombied
nobody told us (nothing
ever
gets told us)
but we are
way more than
half dead already

clap
when we
are told to

hiss
when that evil we have
been warned about, are
forever getting
warned about

every bit and every byte
thrown into the fray to
have us
believe it
is here

warbling its way
into our words, taking
charge of
inflexions, determining
our speech patterns

spewing out
monstrosities
in
some alien
tongue

except
it isn’t

except
it is
some demented
creole of
our own

idiolect of
insanity

and there
that word, in all
its hushed extremity
easy
to parse, let
slip through
your fingers

fall
fester beneath
the floorboards, build
its own underworld

evolve, pledge allegiance,
pride itself
(and, Oh, how
it will pride itself)
or the
ability to puppet
marionette from behind
the screen

light
trapped in its prism

final prison

BEST SHOT

riddle is,
and here we talking,
riddle of RIDDLE

where language
confronting reality
longing
to go mimetic
takes its best shot

despite, in its
heart of hearts, at
the root
of the tree

suspecting infidelity
reality hiding
something, putting
on a show
(and not
for that matter
a critically
acclaimed one)

yes
language has
always clung to the
possibility
that when
we speak of reality
grounding identity

we might
be shocked and
surprised
that when
push comes to shove
the thing
about reality is
there is no such thing

and yet one would swear
to their being
billions of miles, even
lightyears
of thinginess
surrounding us everywhere
in every direction

here
every quantum mechanic
steeped in
field mathematics is
dramatically enjoining you
to hold
his (or her) beer

as you
take a dip
out of consciousness to
hear this
spokesperson speaking

explaining why
everything so
riddled
with riddle

paradox boxed
inside paradox

the more certainly so
the more
simply impossible to
conceive of
such a thing

BIG CAT

big cat, little cat,
let us not dance around this;
I will touch you regardless,
more than brush your fur

seeing yourself
slink right past me:
as if!

little cat, big cat
those eyes at night
I can tell how
keen they are to leopard me

look here
Mrs Sabre-toothed
all these love wounds
where you nibbled

were it not for love
and due caution
you could well have
severed an artery

nestled between
your two paws, soothed
by your purring,
all that
is ferociously sweet
about you

me and all my poems
bleeding out

ANTI

don’t like my poem?
is it
a matter of form, style
or theme

or do you find itself
offensive
by its, and to your,
very nature?

Oh, if only poems
could be conduits to
all we feel and need,
and all
we feel we need
entirely!

you
don’t like my poem

well, I’m willing
to stake a bet
that my poem
doesn’t
like you either

much
like a true mirror

much like
Sir Isaac’s great law
about action
eliciting if
not demanding equal
and opposite reaction

perhaps
my poem
exactly did not enjoy
the reading experience
suffered your
reading
badly

put you the wrong end
of the spectrum of
enlightening being-read
experiences

on a readership scale
placing you
closer to
muddy river pebble
than cut
and polished sapphire

closer to worker bee, even ant,
than to Apollo himself

TWINKLE

twinkle, twinkle
little Persian cat

how I wonder how
you catch

so many of
these bats
as they
flash by

target locked on
in your
green eye

stripped
of suppression
stealth, and
other mega-
tech wiles
dead duck for the taking
when all
this ballyhoo
dies

or flies
home on prayer,
tea tray clumsy as,
battered
and mauled

supposedly invisible,
we are told invincible,
layer
upon layer of
vaunted superiority

little
Persian cat
had
on toast served

deep fried

RIDDLE

drop me from
from nearly thirty thousand
feet

or maybe
more aptly
two thousand and one
plus which
in Arabic numerals
at least will
tally up
to two thousand
and three

the sneakiness of three
plunging us
headlong
via Oedipus, foot leg and
stick of the Sphinx
into the heart
of riddle

whose subject
framed by that odd
counterfactual
joke
of time

we now seen
born
held up to the Sun
but dreaming
of Moon
strangely named Moons

Phobos, Deimos (Oh, I
mean
Demos
Titan, Europa, Miranda,
plus others
as well

five listed here for
every toe on
your foot, finger
on your hand

held up to the Sun, ball
of such Uranian energy

watch him
long for that furnace

given
the slightest opportunity
doomed to there
walk, hobble,
crawl

DISTILLATION

This is
triple distilled

yet
still not refined

rough and
raw and
course around

the edges
like things
put together
haphazard, hastily

no
plan draughted
limited research, trial
and error
design

like
all things of
no finish, poor
workmanship

above all
like life.

COMPLEXITY

aeons of complexity
billions of
years of
evolution

what was once
unicellular microscopic
creature
waking up
at the opposite
end of
time

not a thought
in its head
no idea where
to take this poem

MISUNDERSTANDING

Yes, we did
have our intimate moment

but now
in the afterglow

we seem
to be labouring
under a
misunderstanding

talking to each other
as if every word
macine transcribed
into Enigma code

acting under
the erroneous assumption
that we
are somehow created
as divine reflection

and not
some extension of plankton
whose million
year evolution took
a pretty
ludicrous turn.