ANOMALY
Oh I am
broke-ass
Professor
sadly
I am
outstanding odd anomaly
total oxymoron
and
from whatever angle
you do look at it:
contradiction
in terms
for what can
scholars of human truth
do in this
madness milieu
how hope to negotiate
all collapsed intellectual
context
toxic
dystopia-bound
environment
where we must
identify ourselves transparently
as beyond reason
above truth
flying the flag that we all fly
ultimate of everything
BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)
a mysterious book
appears
what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
bookcase
is,
uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)
my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
from this tree
though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
against the blasphemy
of writing
reading
but
who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?
I write down my dream
but then read further, find,
it was
already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
by the conflicting
gravitational pull
of dramatically dissonant worlds
I burn
all I have written
the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
having failed the inquisition
we are
all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain
stuck
in
either hemisphere
doomed
to tell our tale
leaves pages
things metaphoric,
synonymous
left
all over the place
RIGHT AS SHE BLOWS
Human rights
human rights
you have to squint
through a microscope
to get the gist of where
she is coming from
in her text
on human rights
Oh my humongous Suella
Sulla Braverman Braveheart
you will stand by your principles
fight for them lie
for them
kill and almost
die for
them (not
really, but it rhymes)
and rhyme is good
and euphemism too
and repetition
a zillion times
uncovering the frustrated
inner poet in you
(not that you would
ever stoop to elegy
not
the job of
Home Secretary)
to bewail
lost migrant lives.
NOT TALKING
sadly poem
and film of the poem
are no longer
talking
to each other
film
of the poem
is still in embryo
stuck
in the concept stage
the scriptwriter
is trying to hook
a producer’s interest
presenting
a synopsis
everyone is wondering
how much of poem
should be
dropped, how
much embellished
in order to
produce an adaptation
that does not just
do justice but
extends, re-
interprets (without
going full
Charlie Kaufman)
metaphor
synechdoche
we can open with a tracking shot
to outdo Orson Welles or
Robert Altman
lingering seemingly forever
of each of
the seventeen syllables
all
of the three
shimmering lines
poems 2 die for