CASCADE
leaflets cascade
Iittle
life-parachutes
they
flutter down
tell you
that if you are
at all disinclined
to follow
the stairway
to Heaven
at this
very jumcture
you had better leave
ditch everything
you had better move
because
whatever ladders you thought
doors gates windows
they are all
about to be removed
pancaked out of existence
a time of wandering
is at hand
as has been written
in blood
in the book of centuries
TERRITORY
it puts us
in bizarre territory
the death throes
of a theocracy
when it calls upon
the angels
to save from
economic disaster
military
defeat
when they themselves
have the god button
and think
of humanity
as just
so much meat
DID NOT
I did not expect
the darkness
to have
such surveillance
I did not think
it capable
of flying in
at supersonic speeds
I did not think it would
smudge, alter,
shift and change
words
in the language
pull a veil
of incomprehension
over everything
we see.
FLIES
the Talmud says
the saving of a life
is the saving.
of a world, of
a universe
entire
I would not
go so fat
but
somehow, suddenly
the stars in the firmament
are going out
one by one
the stars
in our flags
dying like flies
STING
I am
an insect
that stings
poised to stick
my stinger
in your finger
the instant
your finger
depresses
the button
adding my tiny
packet of venom
to your gross,
overwhelming
toxicity
on camera
you look so
good and clean
and morally
true
the cataclysmic,
apocalyptic
legions of
demons
photoshopped
the Hell out of you.
JUST IN CASE
waiting for them
to arrive
some anxiety
no small trepidation
outriders
an advance guard
what are they
going to do with us?
the media
is making every effort
to reassure us
serious journalists
have ridiculed our fears
have downplayed
the comments made by
these forces
who swear by
all that is holy
they are
coming in peace
just bringing bombs
and bullets
tanks and rockets
just, as they say,
“in case”
KINDNESS
kindness is
becoming strange
kindness
is becoming alien
it is that thing
crashed and burned
captured
and housed
down in secret
vault in
Area 51
probed and prodded,
drilled and disected
what
is so
inhuman
about it
military technology
desperately needs to know
BEEB
here we are
with our reporters
and cameras
swinging into Gaza
behind an armoured thrust
lucky
to have all this protection
help us
get
our story
one of our group
is fixated on asymmetry
though this is a word
we would not choose
to use
on the BBC
BENJI
oh benji
your irrational state
is in an
itrational state
almost much
hysterical of
late
shuffled out of synch
your brains
in that case
I do not see
a superhuman fate
CLOTHES
in the field of forever contention
tunes battle away
they waltz around you
whilst and even as
you fail to
consider
how naked you are, and
naked not only
but how
transparent
such they, as in the fable,
they instantly infer
that you are Emperor
drunk on the fiction
of power and grandeur
not to
mention the illusion
of flesh and blood and,
of course, clothes
poems 2 die for