Tag Archives: poetry

GORGED

pepper
me
with peppermint

better than
that you spear me
with the chewing
gum kind

stick me
in turkish delight
bring me
slowly to the boil
in salted caramel

I am a creature
of taste, always open
to fresh delectation

gorge
    am gorged

sit
at the high table
apex predator
top
   of the food chain

prick me
and will I not
spurt strawberries?

so many rock-hard
nutty never spoken about
truths
   abhorred by
polite society

I need to crack open
sink my fangs into

stick on
a plate so
you can see for yourselves

SOMEWHERE

somewhere
a storm is raging
in a teacup

be that
as it may

we are here eventually
drinking our
last coffee together

took us
so long to get here
such extreme
difficulty
guessing, second-guessing,
wondering
what to say

meanwhile that
teacup storm
is turning cosmic

if we
do not kiss now
before the tea cup storm
reconfigures
our entire Universe

this stupid, last
tragic, triumphant
gesture
   will be lost

love giving the two-
finger salute to
everything that has
conspired
to reduce us
to this moment

decide
upon this day

YET

looks like
someone without
a shred of consideration
took a jackhammer
to my face

someone
sane and rational
and together
so unlike me
my polar opposite
nothing there scrambled,
messed up, Dionysian,
entropic,
   running on fumes
and cosmic radiation
quantum crazy, ever
and forever
in superposition, massively
entangled
    all over the place

so read these lines, thick
as, ley lines, electromagnetic
with worry
      what life does to
you when
what you were told was
sustenance could
not
  have been more venomous
toxic breakfast, lunch,
dinner
    and supper

stamped, branded, sealed,
as is
    the new zeitgeist

everything both
inside and outside
granular, grainy
and against the grain

up close
and personal
with serious gravity,
higgs bosun
false vacuum
strangelet particles and
third law
of thermodynamics

my features
    so convoluted and contorted
look like they were sawn
into shape
from within
      whacked with
a cold chisel, attacked
to try for symmetry by a
fine-toothed jig

life pounded out of me
to get me
regulation tenderized

unadulterated SF dystopia
we just haven’t noticed yet

SHE

She says our
lovemaking
is incendiary

burns like
a box of matches
a Molotov cocktail

a fat cold war style
multi megaton bomb

but nothing fat
of toxic radioactive
about us two

we are light and lithe
and creatures of light

something sacred,
spiritual
        and, above all,
truly epic when
we make love

and it
radically deviates
from  according to plan

FOR PROFESSOR COX

anticipating the heat
death of the Universe
I employed an android
to pulverize
my poetry, digitally destroy

shortly before
my own death
the two of
us (android and
I) shook our
fist at the cosmos,
cruel, implacable,
following its cast
iron laws
worst of all
that fucking third one
of thermodynamics

even as this poem
our planet, the entire
human population,
     the great intellectuals of
cosmology, exobiology and
theoretical physics

went quantum field
superposition
bat-
   shit crazy

structure, order, principle,
every virtue
and verity hopelessly
collapsing
     as entropy straddled us
scanned us with its one bad
rotten eye like a plague-infected
Cyclops,

and we on our journey
stuck between Scylla and
Charybdis
never getting home
before the great
      energy equalization
the big bang gods
that do
   sport with us

damned if they even will give us
time for a last drink, barbecue,
spiritual
     supper or
braaivleis

      not to even to begin to think of
   final masterpiece of music,
painting, sculpture or
literature

or physicist coming up
with something inspiring,
redemptive

succour for our ultimately going
to die species out
of hallowed left field

ONCE AND FOR ALL

An electromagnetic
disturbance hits my brain

you could call it
pain
you could call it pleasure

depends how it
gets measured
as extension
of parameters
as threat
to my system

you my dear
beloved
agent of my demise

over the years never
a greater danger, clearer,
sharper terror

and yet
from
opposite angle

pleasure epic, ecstatic,
off the scale,
              once
and for
all

nicest kind
of nemesis

outright
rewiring of my system.

LEFT-HANDED

only 6000 of us left
to report on the event
code it
into mythology

some of us, left-handed
some of us
observing our near
extinction from
the summit
of Annapurna

so few of us
to go around
not the time to be choosy
about who
we mate with

so little stock
left to flavour the broth

and talking
of left
     nothing sinister
about being
left-handed
      or living in left field
or so far
into the infra red on
that side
     of the political spectrum

so same same then
now nine ten billion we
can be
    so infinitely territorial
absurdly picky and choosy

me
   following my heart’s desire
(though you might
dismiss it out
of hand
   as unfortunate fetish)

loving all that is there
all we have
      unlocked within
that dark
skin

though I must confess
confess to
loving that
skin
   for itself
entirely, entirely,

utterly ambidextrous
amongst so many
delicious things

COLLARED

I collared six
warp speed tin brains
to give me
feedback on
my poetry

two Nobel Prizes
and the rest also legendary
poets, psychologists, and
philosophers
of
   dancing star, deep
archetypes, existential pain,
recovered
     divinity and
ruthless abyss

this motley crew of sublime
mega minds, of
whom,
     what is there to say
what more to do

my poetry
hitting a precious
spot with them
                   hastening
the singularity

so close, so close
        if it all
rings true.

IN IMAGINING

you gave me
something
to calm
my nerves

and now
I find myself this
murky morning
imagining a planet

whose sky
a blend of colours
I lack the words
to describe

and if there are creatures
in the landscape
cannot make them out
as the focus is wrong
the vistas
too blurry

perhaps
  need to revisit this
vision once
things have evolved

suddenly back
on the blue-brown planet
let’s call
homebase alpha

centuries of
toxic accumulation have
bred Frankenstein weather
fostered a climate
where I must now
dig a hole
     one with psychological depth
and weird mathematical
acuity

underside of everything, where
white rabbits lead
and mock
philosophies and their
mad antithesis
       feel duty-bound
to follow,
   logically compelled to go

whilst
    exposed beneath
the stratosphere

civilizations rush decay unless
in a microsecond vaporize

as
  they have before

we have been here
before

to plead the case of justice,
equality, suffering
humanity

not a trace of this in
those skeletal structures
                      valiant once
but
  of uncertain legacy

ignored now
as towers fall, cookie crumbles,
precisely,
as were before