poetry – Page 57 – poems 2 die for

BREATHLESS WITHOUT BREATH

BREATHLESS
WITHOUT BREATH

got no Elon
Musk starship

no Colorado Mountain
bunker with
all the mod cons

so let
the bombs fall
missiles zero in

let my self split into
muliples like
every heavy
metal atom
under the Sun

who cares
if the system burns
the towers collapse

not me
nothing got to lose
as indifferent as
the darkness
of the Universe, to
how
the dice fall, what
comes about

the life of all those digital
billions of
pure
civilization

gets flashed, windstormed
burnt to ash

BLUEBIRD

there’s a Bukowski in my heart
that wants to get out

and in the heart of that Bukowski
a bluebird that needs
to learn
to fly

but first
crack its shell, hatch,
escape, aspire
for the sky and
outer
space beyond

but as
for that Bukowski
I have no
whiskey for
him
no cigarettes
to dole out

and, to add
to my ignominy, no
checkout girls to
flirt with
grocery clerks to give me
at most a secomd glance
(best
I can do, best
I can get
is mountain of
rejection slips, is
debt collectors swarming,
crawling
all over my ass

yet
he survives, he obdures
this Bukpwski with
his bluebird

I just
cannot express

ON BALANCE

TROUBADOUR TOWN

we spent a day
and night
in
troubadour town

you
with your passable Italian
fiuenr French

and me
with smatterings
of Esperanto and
Provencal

rode every ride at the carnival
having
put our books down

feastimg on pizza and shwarmas
homemade beer and bread
tasty bake potatoea
and
much meat pies

and me a card-
carrying vegan before
this date
was less contrived

than magically
came about

and at
the day’s dizzy pinnacle
the death
dipper at its height

we wondered if this
were Heaven if
Heaven might
be real

then
plummeted (air
sucking the
screams
out of
our lungs

runaway trian on
crazy
tiny
track

full
roller-
coaster down

can sing
of our day in troubadour town

TUNE

IN THE REALM OF RHYME

her hair cascaded
down her shoulders
in golden
rhyming couplets

but, as Princesses go
she was a woman
of guile
and unbridled cunning

needing to be so
for the underbelly of
folktale and
dark rhymes for
children

tell of deep evil woods
where gingerbread houses
call out to
brother and sister to
eat
and be eaten

the ones so sweet with
all that hand-in-hand innocence
as every
evil witch knows
being the tastiest of all

and even
deeper into the woods
there the gray ogres have
built their
own factory

behind searchlights and wire
setting insane quotas of
aah as
their target each day

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species
                       wherever they
happen to
eke
   out their existence
East, West
North, South
     of the Continental shelf

and so me
not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle
along the tiny tarmac roads
that slither like
snake trails
(not
weave their way)
between the graves

not much interest in my
life

this broken life

scheduled to crack somewherw
along the line
                pre-
programned like watch with
Mother, heartache,
failure
      sex sharp and sweet/bittersweet
vanilla, spiced, chocolate,
salted caranel
        melting pot and
set
   to repeat but
not quite
   liks clockwork


before which
(and before
       post cigarette or
thin after mints)

my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
let this poem end as
dead at
point blank range
as (fuck him!)
Larkin’s does

hard to
top him for
negative inspiration

SUREFIRE DEFENCE

I must thank you
for teaching me chess

as I said, as
I told you i know
nothing about the game
have
never played
chess before

and so we played the
strip version
where every piece
I lost
I had to divest
myself, forfeit
some or other
item
of clothing

and so it was
you swept across the board
gobbling up my pawns
and devouring all
my larger pieces

until I was mated, naked
as a baby

long into the night
those victory celebrations

you not notcing
my bishops on
same colour diagonal
missing every
Knight fork, every
en passant

but
a bit of
a conflict of interest here

working on my own
and your own
grandmaster ratings

someday I must
teach you every
gambit
in the book;
every surefire defence

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MOVES