Tag Archives: surreal

POEM IN STONE

POEM IN STONE

prim village
but turn over
enough stones

shape shifters, Caesars,
serial-killers

and
   at the tiny railway station
connecting nowhere
to everywhere
(all
roads lead to)

what slipped off
the rails
what
dark dreams?
(always a train
in a surrealist painting)

Oh and
there the tunnel

who knows
if there is light

if there
is other end?

something big
once stirred here
dared
a big net
to catch it

people remember, will
tell you,

      people forget

what brought them here;
what took them hence

A PLEASURE

A PLEASURE

I would
say

it is a
real pleasure being in your life

but it is a

surreal pleasure

a Dali painting
a Picasso sculpture
a poem by Breton, Aragon,
Apollinaire, Rimbaud or
Neruda

a film
by Luis Bunuel
or Guillermo del Toro

in which
we are stuck together
cannot leave
until we sexually discover
the key

or sacrifice ourselves individually
in order to re-inherit
our subterranean
magical
Kingdom, Queendom

a surreal pleasure
grinning like a Cheshire Cat
whenever it
promises to reappear

YES YANIS

YES YANIS

“the surreal colonizing the real”
                     Yanis Varoufakis

Columbus would have made it
if he had not traded
his ships in for jet skis
and surf boards

would have made it
to the Pacific
if he had not
stopped off in DC
to watch the
Army Navy game

his progress tracked
by GPS satellite, with
constant updates on
FOX, CNN and
alternate media
(outside Columbia and
MIT braves from
the seven nations having
set up
protest encampments)

Zadie so worried
whether her hypothetical
Zionist student would
not be bound
to feel aggrieved, suffer
horrific identity collapse

if hole in your vessel
easy to find a plug in DC
use a member of the house

the Hatter would tell Christopher
as the tenor got weirder
and the teapots all ran out
tea enough
   still perhaps
after a previous party
floating in the harbour, but
for a great teapot at
this time of writing, a
wanderer did inform him,
you might
have to consult Boeing and
the military
     industrial complex

Ah, the logic, the methodology,
suffice it to say, pure area 51
pure Man Ray,

pure
    little girl without arms
bullet
through her head this
tale of Wonderland
is not about

you came to these shores and did
not expect to find palaces
did not expect to
encounter castles
golden dubloons maybe,
perhaps
    a golden gate bridge

but not a landscape of
golf course and tenement
and cloud
    saturated with capital

dodging those Lakota arrowheads

they said that
here there

would be no King
everybody would be a king
as
   many kings on deck
as playing cards

Christopher somehow now
up in the Rockies inside
the Overlook Hotel

ghostly overseer Stanley
whispering in his ear
an adage that
    colonization is

the heart
of the horror

colonization
       the name
of the original sin

Yes, Yanis
      still waiting for the cartoon
version of what I scribbled
down here

have commissioned Salvador Dali
have pleaded with Picasso

YANIS SAYS

YANIS SAYS

Yanis says
the surreal
has colonized
the real

conquering brigades of
Spanish artists
are demanding
that the defeated
natives of the
land they
have invaded

do renounce rationality
surrender clocks

turn nine to
five to
five to nine

with plenty of time
to be rationed out

for Jackson Pollacking
the floor and walls

the crazy beauty
of the patterns
perfect
     for generating
insight into the current
structures of life
that we
   are told to believe
do absolutely cohere.

TIME OF THE SPIDER WASP

TIME OF THE SPIDER WASP But what is the rush? At some point there has to be acceptance acceptance will carry the argument and so, accepting I then accepted the spider wasp’s invitation followed her to the front door and somehow we had found out way out of this crypt moved into the strange air I lingered as she hovered close to my face not wishing to rush enjoying the mystery wondering what kind of portal this must be leading to dimensions adjacent or whole new galaxies infinity is a concept which, crazily, we cannot but believe.

OLD EMBASSY

OLD EMBASSY was sleeping in the old Soviet Embassy dreaming of you naked crashing through the wall driving a Sorbonne student, Paris Commune best May Day Parade tank a T-68 I believe, though I stand to be corrected the crumbly modernist structure recoiling under impact looking for all the world on the threshold of collapse and then we made love, parted left the bullding in swopped Che T-shirts swearing undying Comitern Pact exchanging best childhood Cold War finger on the button scary memories such as that ancient Castro Cuban missile crisis alarms blaring holding hands in fear but much secret juvenile love fascination beneath the impenetrable shelter of my school desk

JUKEBOX

JUKEBOX

we had love
hard and soft love together

in my dreams
or maybe
your dream

difficult to say
how must claim authorship,
location and territory

so receptive our separate states
given you
     had been studying a
painting by Miro,
I, for my part, reading
Neruda

poetry from a time when
Communism was sexy
full of the surreal
and carnival
potential

and Professot Slavoj Zizek,
archetype of
Lacanian pessimist

was young in years, wet
behind the ears

little more to speak of
than mere
    slip of a
            Slovenian lad

Prince’s sign of the times

        song on
the jukebox before
                              we
did
   our dance



DALI BREAKFAST

DALI BREAKFAST

nothing quite says
“Dali dream breakfast”
than a few octopus
tentacles and a
bowl of red squid

eaten inside
a divers
      helmet

other octopi
and squid
      swimming around
the helmet

peering inside
shocked,
      horrified at

the
    surreal shock show

yet by no means
as surreal as other reality TV