poetry – Page 32 – poems 2 die for

EASY

easy to draw
analogies, parallels
but also hard

here I am in the realm
of the luscious isosceles and
prudent equilateral

at right angles
to you
dealing with gravity
and the curvature
of space-time

sliding along the hypotenuse
reading your front page,
back page

headlines
and all about you corporeally
the behoves to
be on page three

my life
spread like toast
with marmalade
like centrefold
like
money shot

and time is money
need to drag out
time together
collapsing
the distance
between us

like we together exact
same hyper-sensual moment

hitting that
Venus Mars conjunction
lightspeed

NEVERTHELESS

(revised version);

same psychedelic
mushrooms

delectable
with melted cheddar
and Cheshire cat

keep these recipes for
inter-dinensional travel
in a saucerful
of secrets with all
my favourite tunes

and there we have it
algae and fungi from afar
about to colonize

thriving
in the darkest room
of your brain (place
where you develop
those photographs you
dare
not share
with anybody

will be end of everything
if they
happen to hack
willfully drill
up there

but those old boomer vibes
peace and love
in our new.
time of genocide who
gives a
fig for them

time for soft
resistance having passed,
that wine
turned sour

people so outrageously sane
they want to spring clean
me
geopolitically

pop
my third, fourth, fifth,
sixth eye (and
counting)

shut the gate slam
the hatch

make it all
scry crystal clear

sum
of all I have ever feared

in trying to
bend reality in the
opposite direction

FROST

frost on the window pane
something in
those fractal patterns

an icy consciousness
peering in

smart enough
to read my mind

AT THE ZOO

at the zoo
the animals
barred
from contact
crave a captive audience

pity how
distant, strange, caged,
changed
the visitors look

peering back through
the grill
from behind the wire

the mystery of their humanity
dead to them

LIGHTNING MAN

lightning man
rainbow serpent

paint myself
ancient wisdom
my skin
red, blue
green

electric, nuclear,
thermodynamic

cover my body
in the signs of tomorrow

pictures that
burn with vitality
re-energize

JASMINE

world tells me
it is
about to end

in the proces
of ending

pours me a porcelain
cupful
of jasmine tea

suggesting
that I do drink
it slowly

which I did,
sipping it softly
moment
by moment

taking to heart
this wise advice
its logic
decidedly not
lost on me

SPINACH

chopping spinach
jungle green,
anaconda green
deepest
darkest Popeye
spinach green
than
you have ever seen

and so
hacking slicing my way
through a thicket
of stalks and
leaves

my weapons of choice:
bush knife; machete

every lost finger
sacrificed to the cause
of green cuisine
to be stored in the fridge
whereupon mailed
to the temple

where sweet vegetation gods
will do their utmost best
to receive
as tribute, sew
back together

TINCTURE

tincture of something
on my tongue

hard to place it
need to pin
it down exactly

outside the world its
raucous self, perhaps
even
more cantankerous maybe

we talk softly therefore
defining our demeanor.
quietly desperate not
to say the wrong thing
feeling our
way towards acceptance,
adjustment

we wonder if this could be
the same small bustling cafe
from all
those years ago

and if we would be doomed
or maybe fortunate enough
to enter into
the same debate

as to whether what
we are eating today
is canneloni or
lasagna
how we see now that
time before when
we almost
shared love

so close we were but
such a gap between us
in our mutual
understanding
of the codes and syntax
governing
offers and
suggestion

so much lost though
perhaps here we are again
in disagreement

could there be
any “if onlys” that we
actually do share

the ghosts of that love and
metaphysical questions
raising the hypothesis that
ghosts
could be lovers

so much here the same
so much that has changed

WAY TO GO

world
about to go

hanging by
a thread

huge asteroid impact
calculated

sure
to hit us plumb

but before that
who can rule out
some supervolcano
beating that
piece of space rock
to
the vital punch?

or before
either of these two
bad boys
dare stake
their climb

we smart enough
to forestall them both
take the matter
of extinction
into our own
hot
thermonuclear hands?

which would be sad
because if it were to be
death
by asteroid

we would
have all the time
in the world
to plan a farewell party

hit the beach
very day of that monstrously
beautiful tsunami

watch the collapse of
ultimate wave front

leading up to which
so much beer and braai
killer jokes and
fireside philosophy

much car backseat sex
and sudden conversion

all in all
such a way to go