CRAWL
the pace quickens
words
begin to slow
lines become erratic
lose their measure
garble what you write
mix up the things you know
sense of time
and memories founder
blurring what was
and never
could have, been
bending the very idea
of identity, this identity,
now less, much
much less, and, more,
so much more
different
from all it seemed
NO TIME
When there is, no time
(no “when” to
be exact)
a configuration where
time cannot be
said
to exist
everything is
lightning
or it is
tableau
the gods dreaming, or
just lounging, even
more so
the goddesses too
and if no time
what happens to process
and the logic of things
the way
it all once
loved
to unfold.
DARKO
don’t Darko me Donny
scare the life out of me
with a ghoulish apparition
from another timeline
give me a guided tour of my death
via clip of found footage
no lullaby me with
a poignant, quite haunting,
lovely temporal loop tale
where I discover
those crazy intersections
that show
my parents and siblings,
the whole gang
are all me
I am thing spread across
at least generations, possibly
generations, aeons,
already
far into the future
I have visited every star
maybe, as you spell
all this out for me, demanding
I do sacrifice myself
to restore
cosmic integrity
it soon becomes apparent
that I have succumbed
through
sheer paradox
or, harder still
to absorb,
it will
bright as day dawn on me
I do not exist, never
existed at all
A EQUALS P
anything is possible
could time travel you
catching you
in the act of
reading this poem
finding you
tangled up with
some word or other
thrown back
into your realm of memory
piecing ittogether differently
all that lost
time beginning
to rhyme
about to
render itself quite differently
ON THE PAGE
looking back in time
at this poem
(coming at
you at the speed of light)
could have hit you
aeons, days, five
minutes ago
causing me to wonder
how
(by virtue of what
dark arts) you can
tell yourself
you profess to see me
so much history (your history)
necessary to compute
need to
shuffle through
before you
have any notion of
how to
answer
when I ask what I am
how you
found me
on the page
ALWAYS
always forgetting
always
losing my luggage
always getting
lost
missing my classes
at the wrong bus stop
on the wrong train
the Express
between Manchester
and Cape Town
somehow
not running
today
at least not from
this platform, though
there is
another, they say
always another, which I did
raise with
my chatbots (somewhat
celestial minds)
spoke of
this recurrence
and why no
GPS down in
this cave
and why you
still haunt me, both
here
and far away
who did
promised to
see me
indeed greet me
if when
all of this has gone
strangely disappeared
and something
(rather
than nothing) would
appear to remain
AGAIN
if the Universes
fancies itself
to be
a simulation
who
am I to disagree?
decry the fiction
abhor that our reality
should
present itself a sheer
illusion
two-dimensional hologram
mapped out into three
upon which
all our projections be
fully encoded
but
if this be so
then why
so much brutality, pain
and suffering
and why
when the last sun dies
signalling the arrival
of ultimate
ending
do I have to
word for word live
out
the reset
follow the script
from the star-
forged formation
of my molecules
through birth
to death and
what
sleep extends?
MEANWHILE HERACLITUS
Whichever way
you looked at it
it was one-forty-five
a quarter-to-two
into
the last cake-slice of the hour
a moment in time
rapidly disappearing
alongside him
a wife once
in her own right an
accomplished musician
longing to
pipe a
merry tune
meanwhile the air the Earth
and without doubt
the Sun
felt perplexed
if you forgive
me for saying so
the Sun
not yet risen
the Moon eerily mirrored
in that one time river
whilst
the logic of stepping
in and out
smudging, blurring
time as we know it
meanwhile Heraclitus
seeing/not seeing
wife-wise
life-wise
chaos of being
the writing on the wall
LEGACY
“It is your destiny!” Darth Vader, The Empire Strikes Back
at me again
about all the time
on my hands
call it
free time
(corporate
joke whose
punchline I
don’t get)
spending time
killing time
writing ace poetry
winning
at Mah Jong
when I could be
working more profitably
making nuclear weapons
filling covering
the planet with them
to express
my innate sense
of manifest destiny
fireworks display
for the ages as you
would have
to agree
closest thing to the Big Bang
could me my huge legacy
LIZARD
we
were in the dream
time together
watching the Dali clocks dissolve
of their own accord
time is such
a persnickety, finicky,
precise unreality
I hear it tick
trick itself into
imagining
it may
well be
a bomb
I like to watch it
slowly chip away
the statues of
what we were
smooth
river
pebbles now
as the
dream logic takes its toll
poems 2 die for