ALWAYS

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

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

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

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

RETURN

RETURN

I rent a
flower

am renting it
right now

rented one
yesterday

this one though,
is special,

before
petals fade,
colour
fades

need to
take it back
get a full
refund, perhaps
      even
accrued interest

good flower
good money

time waits
for no
     man

but this
is how we
make time

time
   (that strange
German sage
said it
again
   and again)

time
is illusion
a fiction

time
is
  return

in all
its horror
and beauty
  

UNAWARES


UNAWARES

on the farm
days meander

what time
does you demon
declare to be

the short hand has
become the lomg hand
has become a ballistic needle
to doom Saturn and
the rock planets
and the rest
of the gas giants
to loneliest existence
unobserved
     for the rest
of eternity

network
with me now
let’s try retrospect, do
our collective level
best
   to piece this
       all together

thesaurus of causalities
every clue connects, and
there’s a plethora
all leading to clues
within
   clues within clues
finding us back where we began

and the text
of all we have, that fickle river,
runs away from us
     flows different with
every new
question we just
          have to ask

no stepping for once into
the once and all

Heraclitus knew this
full well

but now he has gone
we have gone

seems a miracle of massively
metaphysical proportions
is what the rewriting
      of who we are
requires

on the farm where time
takes it easy, is prone
                     to suspend things

change will catch you
fantastically unawares

COLUMBINE

COLUMBINE

we came across
a fallen city

at its heart
there was
a labyrinth

and at
the heart of this
labyrinth
there was a demon

very little of
this culture,
this society remains
not enough to
give a reasonable
picture of
what they were like
the people
who lived here

except we are
pretty sure
we can infer
they were
extremely militaristic

and, perhaps
in the fear that
the shadow of
their conquests
engendered

conducted
savage sacrifices
of the youth
who perhaps tried
in vain to suggest
more peaceful ways