poetry – Page 61 – poems 2 die for

KEY

Hey! No trespassing

Do not assume
you have
right
of way

automatic forgiveness

can fiddle around
in my innermost particles
until
blue in the face

no, not
on my watch
not on my watch

but hey,
     hang on a momento
you say
    brought a key
came with master
opens
    everything

can unlock things here
that I
have grown immune to
that I am totally unaware of

will take me magic carpet
ride mind
to a
special place

down a
hidden passageway
been bolted since childhood

which is, I do
freely admit
a very long time

this shifts
things a bit

or
to be gracious, shifts
everything considerably

kind of
alters my perspective
go
full
Omar Khayyam

trespassing
no trespassing

what’s
mine
is yours

and yours
is mine

on
my watch
automatic forgiveness
forever
and this night

SHRIKE

first laid
eyes
on
you

you love
imprinted me
like a
new-born
chicken

and here I
am
stuck in
a novel going
nowhere

sprearing
useless pages
on a spike
as if
I were a
horrendous shrike

tiny
but different bird
altogether

Vlad Impaler
of all
God’s little
creatures

come
pull this stake
out of my
heart!

I am
not a patch
on Shelley’s
Skylark

Keat’s
Nightingale

his
consummate Hyperion

or novel
of other worlds infused
with these mythologies

GOLD STANDARD

you are
the gold standard

best
touchstone

asked for a handout
you chopped
my head off

split
the atom

stole
several body parts

oh my staccato life subject
to this debt slavery

roll over credit
what was now
roll over
play dead
or actually die

all for a few scrappy
coins in the offing
kind of
smaller
than atoms

and me
under such pressure to
edit down
this poem

get it in tune, right tone
sufficiently complicit
in every single way

ROOM

stet
Heraclitus you are wrong
this man
cannot step
into that bed
river mibd a river

back up a bit
let’s forget media res
simply
start at
the beginning

virtual particles abounding
no hope of
even one
actually actualizing

promise of this moment
never to be realized
come and gone

so many wave fronts
from bed to couch and
back again
washing over me

you
by now
sleeping serenely
me maybe
astral travelling
as far as I can tell

room to
expand, manoeuvre

room
for doubt

here we
make love, don’t
make love

roll two lovely snake eyes
so you may guess
which
forked path

possibilities, probablities,
green light
for go, red
for full stop

in this little ecosystem, tiny
echochamber things
horribly resonant

yes
roll those bones
roll
with
the flow

tick the will
they won’t they
take what’s
in the box

you know
whose doomed cat
is waiting
in that box

the whole nature of
connection, entanglement

now
premised on our moment

and what other, kinder worlds
have decided for themselves
have themselves
found out

let them
film the morning after
still through a lens
of blessed
enchantment

Pan panning with magical
camera across
the mystical space
that will
always
be
her bedroom

for the record (record of
flautist playing
the firsf
time I ever saw
her face)

nothing
to see here

ENDGAME

CONVERGED

all points converging
here
to be converted

or maybe
being in the South
everything
is separating
and

I’m just
looking upside down

doing the TS tarot
hanged man thing

worm
looking up at me
must think me
a skygod down
for day
of revelation

need to do the eeh-aah Doppler
taste
test to

get our highest quality
low down

meanwhile the world
is locked in court case

jury
back inside for this

SEVER

cathedrals soar
mines delve

need t
satisfy our quota
of earthly stockpile
celestial metal

water air earth fire
what soon will
be your soul’s sword
forging
in the flames

when the blade gleams
in arc of
night combat

stars will be caught
their eternal beams severed

MAGIC MIRROR

magic mirror
on the wall

is not
this mirror
at all
at all

in this mirror curse
of Other is more subtle
than ranting
Malificent or

Dorian Gray
beautiful tainted (rapturously
so)

Oh this is
life’s work

work here slow,
brush
stroke after
brush stroke

every revisit a sense of
shift
of movement of
time’s accumulation

time
having
such a good eye, such
a fine touch

pixel after pixel
we move from promise,
to potential
   to sharp revelation
(the shadow
   that was ever could
not now
    be more clear)

something
in those final
subtle touches

translation into speech
that tells the whole story

something flesh not
marble
bone not bronze
soon to here appear

SWEET

ordinarily
poem is sweet

but here
there are
dark places
and terrible spaces

and so
tread lightly
as you
consider yourself warned

and what
is “sweet” anyway
how to
best define it

as I am drawn to you
as bee
to pollen, wasp
to honey

such a sight you
are beautifully polarized

nothing looked
ever better
to these compound eyes

SHARK

thought
it was a
shark

but it
was a devil’s thorn
easy
mistake
to make

this desert once
an ocean
a million
years back

wonder though
with a
shark’s ferocity
(almost as
fierce as your Zulu,
Mongol or Viking)

why there is
no such thing
as a “devil shark”
their names:
Tiger and
Great White and Nurse
and Zambezi

far too
kind and respectful if
you were to ask me