Tag Archives: postmodern

BET YOU

BET YOU

bet you
you read this wrongly

take it
the wrong way
to a wrong place
against
the grain

exult in your power
as supreme
bad reader

sorry to
point this out
rain on your
May Day parade
of tanks
and workers

but everybody
misreads me
it is my fate,
the flaw
in my system

story
of my life
that gets blocked
at the school
board

denounced
in the praesidium

even though
it is all
so unreal

a game,
a mystery within
a mystery

one of those
far-fetched, trying
to push the envelope,
post-
modern, self-
reflexive tales

recounted by the most
untrustworthy of
openly
unreliable narrators

way too
metaphoric of its own
good

mirror image
of the stupid sublimity
of all
cosmic creation

STAGED

STAGED

we are the actors
who never got a gig

Hamlet
was not there that day
so we got turned away
(nothing we could do
that even
   Charlton Heston
   might save)

Ben Hur
El Cid
    himself

we are the ones who got barely
a line
     told ourselves “next time”
“next time”
convinced ourselves the world
would come around
forgive us for

missing our cue, falling
flat on our face

for when you
hit that
        fourth wall

know it is all just a game
all
     being staged

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD MORE POSTMODERN)

IF ONLY (LIFE WERE A TAD
MORE POSTMODERN)

They put the poet on reality television.

I did not get
to see the programme;
analyse the working
out of that proposition.

what was done
in the shower.

Caught on CCTV
for all eternity.

But I think I can hazard
a guess
how it pans out
as poetic expression:

the poet
dies (of course)
as a figure
of tragic exclusion

and the poem, given
space and time,
gets over its grief

rides out into the sunset
with a sestina side-saddle

and everyone, cast
and crew,
all set to
live their lives not
stoically but
much happily ever after

figure
they might need
a script
one where some
budding your therapist
pays off
the mortgage
attending to each psyche
with radical
depression therapy.

ESCAPE

ESCAPE

cue: Steve McQueen
trying to jump the border
wire into Switzerland
on a captured motorcycle

things escape me
they dance away

or used to
but now seem
at this stage more
inclined to hobble

and I laugh
as I watch them
unable to match in
velocity the imperative
to leave

end of Empire, never
an embodiment of its
expansion but
anyone better
to deal with
its declination

conjugate the verb
to colonize, decline the
abstract noun
      “imperialism”
that’s
     its noun category but
nothing abstract about
its impact and
toll on humanity

Norman, Anglo-Saxon/Viking,
Germanic, Latinate
delve deep into
the linguistic roots and
there’s your
causality, there’s your
ideology

there’s everything on the line
at this moment of
impending self-
destruction primed
by wholesale denial

cue Steve McQueen
box-office dynamite
trapped in the coils
of impenetrable wire

NEITHER

NEITHER

what happens
happens

look at this poem
it may go
one way
may go
another

I may take it this way
you may take it that

both of
these roads considerably
less-travelled

only chance of us ever meeting
will be on
    a road

neither of us picked

SLIP

SLIP

sorry

I was writing this poem

and my pen
slipped

the text
spilled

       all over
the place

ruining our
time together

wrecking our date

feel I need
to underline, bold font,
how
   regretful it all
is

how embarrassed I feel

took out my
      pen to write these words

construct
     an apology

and the damn pen as
pens do
       went all Derrida on me

FIXING

FIXING
“where I’m wrong, I’m right”
The Beatles: Fixing a Hole

let’s
see what
we got here

check if
there is a hole
if so
   how to
fix it

if not
why not?

poem need
the right kind of holes
(where would
we be
   without holes)

just jokin’
poem got to be
fun
   poem got
to be serious

we had some
fun so
   let’s go
serious

switch of a sudden
turn on dime
between
   fun and serious

truth to power: break
in through the back
leave via
    the front

do your dreadlock goldilock
thing
   have your Gulliver
child’s play
                   turn it
          all
upside
      down

seems like you serious
but
    can we be
sure to
    be sure

that last line
     gleams wickedly, such
a look in your eye

and eye need
           the light

how else
delight?

bend those bars in
before out

     your light coming in
your light
going out

       see here: a VOICE

in with

       a shout

BECAUSE BECAME

BECAUSE BECAME looks off the charts sharper and so much brighter in full extended spectrum of colours and booming panopolies of sound look closer, feel the width, check the texture decayed, deceased, delimited, disinclined frozen upon demand and so beneath the flash flesh colour paler shades lurk already haunting shadows at best of what was big screen Technicolor huge popcorn before essence of all that was before before became